Proton CEO: testing your code is loser thinking

In late August a Proton engineer asked for something simple in the company Slack: give the security team at least a few days to test new code before it ships. CEO Andy Yen replied: "That's bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it's possible to be fast and secure. Stop thinking always of how to be slower." Then he added that staff should stop lovingly handcrafting all their code and use AI more.

Proton is the Swiss company that sells privacy for a living: encrypted Proton Mail, a VPN, cloud storage, a password manager. Inside, according to eight current and one former employee, things look different. CTO Bart Butler told a meeting that AI wrote 90% of the company's code in October, and staff say much of it was written with Claude. Software that counts how much code AI generates was installed on work machines. Butler's manifesto in Slack opened with "Your old job is gone", and Yen said this is the last year Proton hires engineers in the usual sense.

On Monday staff got an email saying nearly the whole company would be "re-interviewed" about how they use AI, with results that could affect "continued employment". On Thursday an investigation with the leaked messages came out. Yen's reply on Reddit was downvoted more than 1,200 times, users started posting that they were cancelling paid plans, and some called for him to resign.

On Friday, at a two hour all-hands, Yen cancelled the re-interviews. He admitted "a communication failure on my part", then added: "Going forward, I'm still going to push." Butler put it more bluntly: "We fucked up, we know we fucked up." Leadership promised no jobs would be lost to AI and said a reorganization is coming next month. Some employees say the things the interviews were meant to measure will simply move into regular performance reviews.

A company that spent years explaining why you shouldn't trust big tech is now explaining to its own customers why testing code is optional. Awkward.