Proton CTO Bart Butler: ‘Programming Is Dead,’ Engineers Should Help Models Write Code

Proton has made public an internal memo written about a month ago by CTO Bart Butler, titled “AI @ Proton, Engineering Manifesto.” According to ChainCatcher, Butler argues that software engineering underwent an irreversible change this year as large language models and their tools became capable of writing code; one senior Proton engineer said no one in their business unit writes code by hand anymore. Butler says the era when manually writing good code was a core engineering skill has passed. Models can take on time-consuming tasks such as documentation, testing and boilerplate code, and can contribute to discussions about architecture and system design. Despite engineers’ widespread use of large language models, he says, Proton has not seen a major productivity increase for three reasons: engineering culture has not shifted enough; the company is still using models mainly to speed up existing processes rather than removing bottlenecks across the development workflow; and the organization has not invested enough to coordinate company-wide changes. Butler says engineers should focus on helping models produce better code faster, acting as team leads for models and agents and enabling them to work autonomously and continuously. Repository-level context, shared skills and prompts can reduce repeated failures. He also expects most manual code reviews to end as the company changes processes spanning continuous integration, design, approvals, specifications and review. The memo says expertise and sound engineering practices remain important: maintainability, documentation and testing still matter, though best practices may change as costs and capabilities shift. Butler writes that “programming” is dead, but engineering and expertise are not; engineers should optimize systems and maximize automation. Proton says it will organize and commit resources to this transition, while noting that the memo is not an in-depth engineering document on security, reliability or infrastructure. It also cites more than 1 million tech-sector layoffs in recent years and Microsoft’s proposal last week of 60,000 buyout offers.