The move came after 404 Media published an investigation into how Proton CEO Andy Yen was aggressively pushing AI across Proton despite security concerns and the culture of fear he has created.
as mentioned in another comment, it’s possible to make it secure and maintainable if you manage AI properly. Managing AI is like a product manager managing a team. It’s up to you to push for security and maintainability, but AI can absolutely look for vulnerabilities and holes and code smells if you ask for it.
I don’t think Andy Yen was saying that slower = worse, or that faster is all that matters. My read of the conversation is that engineers were pushing against AI saying that it makes code less secure and maintainable, and Andy was pushing back saying that’s not necessarily the case, that it’s possible to use AI to speed things up while maintaining quality.
In one exchange, an employee in the company’s security Slack channel urged Proton to at least take a few days to pentest newly written code before pushing it live. “That’s bullshit and loser thinking. Of course it’s possible to be fast and secure,” Yen wrote in the channel at the end of August. “Stop thinking always of how to be slower, and focus more on how to be faster.” Yen added, “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”
Good thing he apologised, yet it still looks that the c-suit still mostly concerned with speed. Apologizing for shitty behaviour is still worse than not being shitty in the first place.
FYI, I don’t think this situation is cause enough to ditch Proton, but I still stand by my original comment.
My job is not to be fast. This expectation of development speed is bosses not understanding why they hire specialists.
I code, make sure it works, is secure and maintainable. That’s how I own my work.
as mentioned in another comment, it’s possible to make it secure and maintainable if you manage AI properly. Managing AI is like a product manager managing a team. It’s up to you to push for security and maintainability, but AI can absolutely look for vulnerabilities and holes and code smells if you ask for it.
Yet somehow speed seems all that matters to c-suits.
Coming back to my point: slower ≠ worse.
Can AI speed things up? Oh, yes. Is it really better? It depends, but I’m leaning to no.
I don’t think Andy Yen was saying that slower = worse, or that faster is all that matters. My read of the conversation is that engineers were pushing against AI saying that it makes code less secure and maintainable, and Andy was pushing back saying that’s not necessarily the case, that it’s possible to use AI to speed things up while maintaining quality.
There was a Lemmy post about a Proton employee providing more context for Andy’s statements: https://no.lastname.nz/post/4106893
Good thing he apologised, yet it still looks that the c-suit still mostly concerned with speed. Apologizing for shitty behaviour is still worse than not being shitty in the first place.
FYI, I don’t think this situation is cause enough to ditch Proton, but I still stand by my original comment.