There's a sweeping "manifesto" that's making the rounds alongside application engineers — and many say it's deceased on.
Proton CTO Bart Butler wrote a three-page discourse on the province of coding, as reported by 404 Media. The memo explains that the function of the engineer is no longer what it formerly was, and the business must modify to the province of AI.
"Your job has basically changed," the memo reads. "It is no longer to compose code, and LLMs are not current to assistance you compose improved code faster. Your job is to assistance the LLM compose improved code faster."
Proton did not react to a petition for comment from Business Insider, but earlier told 404 Media that "we have sometimes been too blunt or too dilatory in explaining ourselves to our people."
Among the techies online, the manifesto's bluntness was a feature, not a bug. Peter Steinberger, an OpenAI employee and creator of the hugely famous OpenClaw AI agent, stated that Proton CEO Andy Yen "gets it."
This. Even if peogress the next two years is lone fractional as accelerated as the trajectory we are on now, the old job of application engineer is gone.
— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) October 30, 2026
"The civilization war, or fairly the defeat of character several engineers awareness as AI redefines our jobs is difficult; I sympathize," Steinberger wrote. "Also comprehend that he runs a endeavor and power has constricted patience whenever we now had two years to process, learn, alter and grow."
He predicted that if AI's advancement complete the next two years is equal fractional as accelerated as the current trajectory, "the old job of application engineer is gone."
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails who's commonly known as DHH, wrote that any workforce disturb by the memo were "in for a coarse journey as the age of agents unfold."
The genuine AI psychosis is thinking "this is fair another tool" or "it's fair a stochastic parrot" and "humans motionless need to assessment all line". You have to break out of it.
— DHH (@dhh) October 30, 2026
Lauren Tan, a chief engineer at SpaceX, wrote that "the period for mourning coding is lengthy over."
Tan wrote that all engineer wields an "incredibly elastic and capable workforce." That echoes the memo, anywhere Butler reportedly wrote that all engineer is now "a squad leader" of models and agents.
Other engineers highlighted their favorite parts of the manifesto or quoted what they called a "banger."
Plover Labs cofounder Edward Ahn made a chart of big CEOs' memos concerning AI. The leaders ranged from Shopify to Coinbase to Block. At the end was Proton's Butler.
Ahn's point: "Every few months the memo gets a small additional honest."
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Henry Chandonnet is a elder newsman on the Business News desk. He writes concerning tech culture, from Silicon Valley's startup category to the mundane AI user. He additionally closely covers Big Tech and the workplace. Henry earlier wrote for Fast Company, anywhere he covered trending tech news. He's written for The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture.Email Henry at [email protected], attain him on Signal at henrychand.30, or prosecute him on X @HenryChandonnet.
