Proton CTO: Programming is Dead, Engineers Should Help Models Write Code

Privacy email and VPN service provider Proton has publicly shared an internal memo titled "AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto," written by Chief Technology Officer Bart Butler about a month ago. The memo states that software engineering has undergone irreversible changes this year, as large language models and their tools are now capable of writing code. A senior Proton engineer indicated that no one in their business unit is writing code by hand anymore. Butler believes that the era of manually writing excellent code is over, and time-consuming tasks such as documentation, testing, and boilerplate code can be handled by models, which can also participate in architecture and system design discussions.

Butler pointed out that despite engineers widely using large language models, Proton's productivity has not significantly improved for three reasons. First, the engineering culture needs to shift; the role of engineers is no longer to write code but to help models write better code faster. Each engineer should become a team leader for models and agents, promoting their autonomous and continuous work while reducing repetitive failures through repository-level context, shared skills, and prompts. Second, the company is still in the first phase of using models to accelerate existing processes and needs to move to the second phase, eliminating bottlenecks across continuous integration, design, approval, specifications, and code review, with most manual code reviews expected to end. Third, there is a collective action problem between individual use of models and the transformation of company-wide processes, as the organization has not invested enough resources.

The memo emphasizes that this is not the end of expertise or good engineering practices; maintainability, documentation, and testing remain crucial, but best practices will adjust with changes in cost and capability. Butler wrote, "Programming is dead," but engineering and professional skills have not vanished. The new responsibility of engineers is to continuously optimize and maximize automation as builders, and Proton will organize and invest resources to complete this transformation. Proton stated that this memo is not an in-depth engineering document discussing safety, reliability, or infrastructure. It also mentioned that tech companies have laid off over 1 million people in recent years, with Microsoft proposing 60,000 buyout packages last week.

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