Life & Mortality Quote by Bram Cohen

There is a particular kind of burnout that only shows up in technical work: not exhaustion from building, but exhaustion from watching what you built evaporate. Bram Cohen frames that pain with the blunt verb "die", treating software less like a product than a living thing whose survival depends on adoption. It is a cold-eyed admission that brilliance without uptake is just a private hobby with better documentation.

The line carries the subtext of an engineer turning away from prestige metrics - elegant code, clever papers, peer approval - toward the messier currency of utility. "People would actually use" is a quiet rebuke to the lab-to-nowhere pipeline where prototypes impress committees and then disappear into obsolete repositories. He's describing not failure of intellect but failure of distribution: the gap between invention and infrastructure, between what can be built and what can endure.

In Cohen's case, that frustration is inseparable from the late-90s internet moment: bandwidth was scarce, centralized hosting was expensive, and the network rewarded designs that scaled socially as much as technically. BitTorrent's genius wasn't just a clever protocol; it was an adoption strategy disguised as architecture. By making every downloader a contributor, the system doesn't beg institutions for resources - it conscripts users into the solution.

The intent is pragmatic, almost defiant: stop making artifacts that need caretakers. Build something that survives because it gets used, and gets used because it makes users powerful.