I’ve been paying for Proton for many years, and it’s what I propose whenever person asks how to get off Gmail. This week 404 Media published an inquiry into how Proton’s guidance is pushing AI inner the company. The item that made the rounds came from the safety Slack channel: an engineer asked for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it, and CEO Andy Yen answered that it was “bullshit and loser thinking”, afterward told the squad to halt lovingly handcrafting code and use AI more.
For the archetypal time, I’m not certain I’d motionless propose them.
A lot of the reactions treat this as an AI story, as if any AI-written code poisons the well, and I think that misses the point. Engineers using AI to compose code is the new norm. It’s fine as lengthy as there are guardrails about it: person reviews what the example produced, it gets tested, and person is accountable for what ships.
What the reporting describes is a CEO telling an engineer, in forefront of colleagues, that raising a safety involvement was “loser thinking”. Staff were told their AI use could decide whether they kept their jobs, and whenever that scheme was dropped following it leaked, Yen stated it had already served its purpose. None of this is concerning AI. Plenty of companies are rolling out coding agents correct now without humiliating anyone, so if Proton can’t, the issue sits alongside its leadership.
The tradeoff Proton can’t make
For most companies, selling several alert for speed is a sensible call. Proton is a privacy company, though, and what its users pay for is the confidence that the group construction it are careful. Shipping gradually and carefully is part of what they’re selling. A bad publish from a B2B vendor can be catastrophic, but for a business akin Proton, a bug that exposes users’ communication would be fatal.
One of the workforce defending the business on Reddit added several context that was meant to help: Yen was fine alongside pentesting, as lengthy as it didn’t dilatory downward the pipeline.
This is one of a few workforce pretending to courageously dissent, but in actuality agreeing alongside the authoritative company line. It says akin astroturfing and a clumsy attempt at emergency management. No employee who shared on Reddit disagrees alongside how things were handled or alongside anywhere the business is going.
Beyond the clumsiness, it shows a guidance that now treats the constraints that made Proton value paying for as the item slowing it down.
I’d akin to keep recommending Proton, but that depends on the engineer asking for a few additional days of evaluation motionless winning the disagreement against a guidance obsessed alongside speed and arbitrary publish dates.
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