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There's a sweeping "manifesto" that's making the rounds with software engineers — and many say it's dead on.
Proton CTO Bart Butler wrote a three-page sermon on the state of coding, as reported by 404 Media. The memo explains that the role of the engineer is no longer what it once was, and the company must adapt to the state of AI.
"Your job has fundamentally changed," the memo reads. "It is no longer to write code, and LLMs are not here to help you write better code faster. Your job is to help the LLM write better code faster."
Proton did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider, but previously told 404 Media that "we have sometimes been too blunt or too slow 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 popular OpenClaw AI agent, said that Proton CEO Andy Yen "gets it."
This. Even if peogress the next two years is only half as fast as the trajectory we are on now, the old job of software engineer is gone.
— Peter Steinberger 🦞 (@steipete) October 30, 2026"The culture war, or rather the loss of identity some engineers feel as AI redefines our jobs is difficult; I sympathize," Steinberger wrote. "Also understand that he runs a business and might has limited patience when we now had two years to process, learn, change and grow."
He predicted that if AI's progress over the next two years is even half as fast as the current trajectory, "the old job of software engineer is gone."
David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails who's commonly known as DHH, wrote that any employees upset by the memo were "in for a rough ride as the age of agents unfold."
The real AI psychosis is thinking "this is just another tool" or "it's just a stochastic parrot" and "humans still need to review every line". You gotta snap out of it.
— DHH (@dhh) October 30, 2026Lauren Tan, a principal engineer at SpaceX, wrote that "the time for mourning coding is long over."
Tan wrote that every engineer wields an "incredibly elastic and capable workforce." That echoes the memo, where Butler reportedly wrote that every engineer is now "a team 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 about 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 little more honest."
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Henry Chandonnet is a senior reporter on the Business News desk. He writes about tech culture, from Silicon Valley's startup class to the everyday AI user. He also closely covers Big Tech and the workplace. Henry previously wrote for Fast Company, where he covered trending tech news. He's written for The Daily Beast, People Magazine, and Vulture.Email Henry at [email protected], reach him on Signal at henrychand.30, or follow him on X @HenryChandonnet.
