Proton's AI manifesto for software engineering

pacha3000

Made a great use of my weekend to end my business subscription to Proton. This is the last straw.

rlvesco7

"This is not the death of expertise. The LLM is fast. You are slow, but you carry with you a lifetime of experience, judgment calls, and understanding." 1) Does expertise atrophy if you are just a human-in-the-poop (I mean loop) for an extended time period? 2) How do junior engineers develop the so-called expertise if they have not gone through all the steps and suffered repeatedly? On the privacy and security side: 1) Using AI to create apps seems to make them more vibey, less reliable and less secure ... at the same time AI has the ability to find bugs better than before. Feels like a paradox that will get resolved at some point in the future, but at the moment software "feels" like it's getting less reliable. 2) If I were a government, I'd be super excited to inject backdoors and subtle vulnerabilities via AI into proton. To use AI without a good strategy into a privacy organization is like having the fox guard the hen house.

spottedmarley

After ~10 years with ProtonMail I have gone back to hosting my own email and, with the help of Claude, I now have the email setup I've always wanted. I'm actually kinda glad now to have been forced to finally solve email for myself so, thanks ProtonMail, it was a good run.

overflowy

Ah yes, let yourself become a meat proxy, embrace it, love it, you will surely become better this way!

asphodele

It seems nothing is safe from enshittification.

mrinf1nity

> “Programming” is dead. Engineering is not, nor is expertise. No, it isn't. I'm sorry but this coke-bender manifesto is hilarious. Proton actively maps user accounts (sysadmins just look in) to IP addresses, e-mails, and shuts down journalist accounts because governments ask them to. Use bittorrent for some Linux isos on their free service it'll DNS hijack your webpages to whine at you, aka they openly MITM you. > But it is past time to commit, as an organization, to the transformation that the moment requires Replace this guy with AI.

Dxtros

Why is the bottom line of this to work faster? I understand there’s a fear about “being left behind.” Being faster won’t stop you from being left behind. Unique insights and deliberate REAL improvements that benefit users will keep you relevant. Think about your audience. Proton is uniquely positioned, not because of how fast it deploys. I pay proton for its privacy, security and separation from from large tech company’s dark practices. This manifesto from the Proton CTO is framed as an opinion piece, which is insane. As a CTO your opinion shapes your technical policy. I hope this is truly an opinion piece that employees are able to disagree with. This is an opinion on how to burn out your employees, chasing speed, which benefits your users in no way. It’s an opinion on how to cultivate a toxic environment that treats its employees like less than they are. It’s an opinion that feels so out of touch with what I pay for and what users care about. AI is a tool, that people should have the freedom to use when it actually helps them work. Otherwise it can actually make things worse and slower. It isn’t magical. Your employees aren’t robots treat them well. Or leave and vibe code piles of nothing really fast, if that’s your opinion.