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farewell to Proton

I have been using a company called Proton for managing my passwords. The CEO of that company recently made some astounding comments, such as announcing that they company would make all staff re-interview to ensure they were making the most of AI. There was a big blow-back online and he partially walked back his comments. But then the firm published an AI manifesto in which it concludes that the software developer's job is "no longer to write code", but "It is your job to make the LLM write better code faster."

This CEO simply doesn't get it. I've worked extensively with LLM for software development; faster is not my job, the LLM is 100x faster than I am, or 10,000x. I'm there to provide the right framework, ensure the right built-in tests, and to integrate the non-functional specifications - especially around security. And then to test, test, test. I manually test, I run automated tests that I observe, and I ask the LLM to do a lot of automated "headless" tests. This goes all the way back to "The Mythical Man-month", a book written in the 1960's, which espoused a 3:1 ratio between testing and writing code.

When I saw what the CEO of Proton was doing, I switched away from my Proton Pass account immediately because I can see that there are going to be major problems. Here, he is doubling down on that misguided approach. It's crazy: Proton were supposed to be the ones to do things differently, the privacy- and security-minded ones. Guess we know better now.