Programming is dead: Proton CEO says this is the last year of hiring engineers

Proton CEO Andy Yen told the Swiss privacy company’s engineers that 2026 would be its last year hiring engineers, as internal Slack messages and a manifesto described an aggressive push to adopt AI. Proton offers a VPN, Proton Mail, encrypted storage, a password manager and the Lumo AI assistant. In a Nov. 1 engineering manifesto, Chief Technology Officer Bart Butler said AI generated 90% of Proton’s October code and called manual coding outdated. Yen then canceled re-interviews planned for Nov. 4-11 to assess employees’ AI use and decide retention, acknowledging a communication failure; Butler and Proton’s official X account apologized.