Andy Yen, the CEO of Proton, had a message for an employee in the company’s security Slack channel who urged the company 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.”

In a follow-up message, Yen reiterated his point: “only losers think like that.” His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”

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[–] 8 points 1 week ago

Horrible stuff. I've been using Proton since 2020 and back then Proton's thing was just an encrypted email service. Year after year, they've started adding all these other apps and services to Proton's platform, and some of them fits nicely with the core email service (calendar, cloud for files, VPN). But lately they've began adding apps and services such as AI LLM chat (which is pretty crappy and inaccurate), remote video meeting software (which is really barebones feature wise) and apparently now they are working on Chromium based "privacy" browser (as if we don't have enough browsers already, let alone Chromium based). All of this requires a lot more developers and takes more time to develop and maintain, which is probably why Andy is so keen on making progress faster by using AI.

But why does Proton need to add all of these apps? To fight big tech in all fronts? To create same kind of ultra loyal, "will buy anything" fanboy culture around Proton products like Apple has (and to lesser extent Google has)? Or is it to grow bigger company much faster than originally intended (because the investors want that) all the while taking bigger financial risks in doing so?

In any case, Andy needs to step down as the CEO. The next CEO needs to take a good hard look at what's relevant to their customers. I don't think anyone is asking for a vibe-coded Proton web browser, just because it's "Proton".

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