Proton CTO: Programming is dead, engineers should help models write code

The privacy email and VPN service provider Proton 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 can now write 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; 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 although engineers are widely using large language models, Proton's productivity has not significantly improved for three reasons. First, the engineering culture needs to shift; the work 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, and 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 enter the second phase, which involves eliminating bottlenecks across continuous integration, design, approval, specifications, and code review, with the expectation that most manual code reviews will come to an end. Third, there is a collective action problem between individual use of models and the overall transformation of company 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 critical, 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 allocate resources to complete this transformation. Proton stated that the memo is not an in-depth discussion of engineering documents related to security, reliability, or infrastructure. It also mentioned that technology companies have laid off over one million people in recent years, and Microsoft proposed 60,000 buyout offers last week.