Proton CTO Internal Memo Leaked: Programming Is Dead, Engineers Are Not

Joseph Cox of 404 Media obtained an internal AI manifesto from Proton's CTO; according to him, there were multiple copies. Proton makes encrypted email and VPNs, and its CTO is named Bart. When Omar shared the document on X, he added a comment: stop focusing on using LLMs to help you write better code; instead, make LLMs write better code faster.

The manifesto's wording is direct. LLMs can automatically generate code, and traditional manual coding work is decreasing. Engineers' focus is shifting from writing code to managing and optimizing LLM use. Team collaboration is becoming more important, because one person managing a pile of models isn't realistic. Bart's signature line is even blunter: "Programming" is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. Translated, that means programming is dead, engineering is not dead, and expertise is not dead. Your old job is gone; the new job is called builder. You can do more and have more impact—provided you seize the opportunity.

Omar's addendum is more worth reading than the manifesto itself. He says orchestration and systems thinking are more important than before, and one more thing must be added: continuously use rigorous evals to measure the effectiveness of these LLMs, automations, and workflows. In plain English, that means you have to know whether AI is actually doing a good job.

That's where the problem lies. In the replies, a user named Cozy says measurement is the hardest part, because agents grade themselves too generously. His suggested starting approach is crude but works: pick a small set of real tasks from your own repo, hard-code pass/fail checks, and rerun them every time you change a prompt or switch models. Another reply, from Asmir, is even less forgiving: the agent writes code and also writes tests; the pass rate rises only because the tests have been changed to more easily match what the code already does.

There's a rather ironic picture here. Proton is a company that makes its living from encryption and privacy; users entrust it with their most private things. After the manifesto spread, one user replied: I just migrated all my passwords to Proton Pass and was getting ready to de-Google, and now you're telling me my most private conversations will be handed over to a bunch of vibe-coding hackers? Another user put it more briefly: What else can you trust?

At the end of the document, Bart writes that the era of experimentation is still ongoing, but the time to act is now. That sentence itself is not wrong. It's just that "Programming is dead" is loud, while the things that truly aren't dead have become more valuable: code architecture, systems thinking, and eval design. The old job is indeed gone. The first lesson of the new job is managing a group of agents that give themselves high scores.