"His ultimate message for the team was to “stop lovingly handcrafting all our code and use AI more.”"

Mmmmm... I think I may have to score this particular point for the CEO. Lovingly handcrafted code has been many things over the past 30 years, but "secure" is not one of the adjectives I'd apply to it. Anyone who thinks that the lovingly handcrafted code has always just been wonderfully secure needs to check the tint on their glasses.

A proper AI setup probably can produce more secure code more quickly than conventional development processes... however one of the keys will be to understand that yes, that will still be slower than writing code that is not rather carefully analyzed for security and a company like Proton had better have a strong commitment to never, ever skipping that step because it's slowing them down or it got expensive. "Proper" in "proper AI setup" is the most important word.

But that's not to say that I'm endorsing everything else he said. Even if it is true that companies will be able to stop hiring engineers, which at the moment I seriously doubt [1], a company like Proton should expect to be one of the last companies who can do that, not be getting publicly excited about it first. Hey we dumped all our engineers because our managers can just prompt our AIs just as well here in October 2026 would definitely be a "instantly cancel any Proton services I had" signal for me.

[1]: One of the things I don't expect to change is that there are plenty of people I would describe my actual day-to-day work to and they would consider it a living hell if they had to do it. I still quite enjoy it overall. And there are plenty of jobs that other people love and I would consider a living hell. Even in 25 years that's going to be the case. There will be people willing to put up with the process of working with the system to create this stuff... but the people who are willing to be professional about this, do the QA, do the work beyond the first fun prompts, is going to be a minority, and an even smaller minority who take the time to get good at it. There will always be people who are better and people who are worse.

While I agree that handcrafting code has never been any kind of guarantee of secure code, I'd argue that it remains a condition: if all you have is a set of specs (or even worse, specs written by AI and not read carefully by anyone) and no mean to ensure that the implementation actually matches the spec, you essentially have no understanding of what the code is doing, which is security suicide.

Of course, AI reviewers and security tools will catch some security errors, but this should come as an addition to a proper security design, not instead of it.