Proton CTO says "programming" is dead but engineering is not in published AI manifesto

What the manifesto says

Bart Butler, Proton's chief technology officer, published the memo on Proton's blog on November 1, 2026. He says he wrote it internally about a month earlier to set out the AI adoption path Proton must follow. In it he quotes a senior engineer: "No one writes code in {business unit name} anymore," with the business unit name redacted.

"Your job has fundamentally changed. It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster," Butler writes. "Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster. Every engineer is now a team leader, a manager, and your direct reports are the models and agents you use."

He closes: "'Programming' is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. Your old job is gone. Your new job as a builder will let you do more and have more impact than you ever have, if you seize the opportunity."

Why Butler says the gains have not arrived

Butler asks why productivity hasn't increased dramatically if everyone already uses LLMs, and gives three reasons. The first is engineering culture: engineers should push the limits of what models can do autonomously, and fix repeated failures with shared context files, skills and prompts.

The second is that Proton has been "almost completely stuck at phase 1," using LLMs to speed up tasks inside existing workflows. Removing the coding bottleneck exposes others, such as CI capacity, design, approvals and code review, and he writes that "most human code review will end" eventually. Reworking those processes is what he calls phase 2.

The third is a collective action problem: retooling a whole team or company needs organisation and resourcing that Proton has not yet invested in. He says Proton will fund those investments.

Not the end of expertise

Butler writes that this "is not the death of expertise" and "also not the death of good engineering practices," adding that documentation and tests remain crucial. He argues that as tests get cheaper to write and maintain, the old best practice of limiting end-to-end tests may change.

The backdrop

TechRadar reported that the manifesto was published two days after a leaked story said Proton would re-interview some staff about their AI use. In a statement on X, Proton said it would not re-interview staff, that there would be no AI-related job losses, that its "use of AI will never be at the expense of security," and that it would open source several internal tools and publish how its code and security reviews work.

Correction

An earlier version of this article described Bart Butler as Proton's CEO; he is its CTO. It also cited two reports that could not be found and included a three-phase framework and quotes that are not in the memo. It has been rewritten from the memo and TechRadar's reporting.