Time & Perspective Quote by Bram Cohen

Maturity in programming, Bram Cohen suggests, looks less like cleverness and more like detachment. The line swerves away from the romantic myth of the coder-as-author and toward something closer to an engineer’s ethic: your job isn’t to protect your effort, it’s to protect the system. The sting is in “spent time on,” because time is the currency programmers feel most entitled to recoup. Cohen calls that entitlement a trap. If the code is pointless, the time was already gone; clinging to the artifact just compounds the loss.

The subtext is a quiet jab at sunk-cost thinking dressed up as craftsmanship. Programmers often treat code as proof of progress, a visible receipt for invisible labor. That’s why “willingness” matters: throwing code away isn’t a technical skill, it’s an emotional one. It requires admitting you were wrong, that the problem changed, or that the original problem wasn’t worth solving. In software culture, where status can ride on complexity and “hard parts,” that’s a small act of ego resistance.

The context also fits Cohen’s background: as the creator of BitTorrent, he worked in a domain where efficiency, simplicity, and ruthless iteration aren’t aesthetic preferences; they’re survival traits. Networked systems punish unnecessary moving parts. The quote reads like advice from someone who learned that the fastest path to robust software often runs through the trash bin, not the archive.