--- title: It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge | daily.dev description: Proton's CEO Andy Yen called an engineer's request for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it 'bullshit and loser thinking', telling the team to... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge | daily.dev og:description: Proton's CEO Andy Yen called an engineer's request for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it 'bullshit and loser thinking', telling the team to... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/M2dUF5C4X.png og:image:alt: It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 3 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary Proton's CEO Andy Yen called an engineer's request for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it 'bullshit and loser thinking', telling the team to stop 'lovingly handcrafting code' and use AI more, according to a 404 Media investigation. Staff were also told their AI usage could decide whether they kept their jobs, a plan later dropped after it leaked, with Yen saying it had already served its purpose. Raed Chammam argues this isn't really an AI story since using AI to write code is fine with proper guardrails. The real problem is leadership treating security caution as a brake on velocity, which is a particular problem for a privacy company whose pitch depends on careful, trustworthy engineering. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Questions this post answers ### What did Proton's CEO say about an engineer's request to pentest code before shipping it? Andy Yen reportedly called the request 'bullshit and loser thinking' and told the team to stop 'lovingly handcrafting code' and use AI more instead, according to a 404 Media investigation into Proton's internal Slack. He also told staff their AI usage could affect whether they kept their jobs, a plan later dropped after it leaked. _Anyone weighing how fast to push AI adoption against security review can follow this debate on daily.dev._ ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 118 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-11-01). **TL;DR:** The discussion overwhelmingly sides with the engineer and criticizes the CEO's 'loser thinking' remark as hypocritical for a company whose entire pitch rests on careful, trustworthy security engineering, with many saying trust in Proton is now broken. **Sentiment:** 5% positive · 15% mixed · 80% skeptical **The case for** - A few argue AI coding tools are now mainstream and can even outperform humans at tasks like pentesting, so resisting them is denial. - Some say trading caution for speed is a normal business tradeoff and engineers who refuse any compromise misunderstand their job of delivering business value. **The pushback** - Many say a privacy/security company specifically sells carefulness, so cutting pentesting for velocity undermines its entire value proposition. - The CEO's 'bullshit and loser thinking' language is seen as disrespectful to staff and a red flag about leadership culture. - Commenters link the push for speed to shareholder/ARR pressure from the Proton Foundation rather than genuine user needs. - Several say trust in Proton is already damaged and describe switching or considering switching to alternative providers. - Some frame the incident as part of a broader pattern of Proton's product quality and focus declining as it expands beyond email. **By community** - hackernews (skeptical): Discussion is dominated by criticism of the CEO's comments and leadership, with widespread distrust of Proton's direction, alongside a smaller contingent defending AI-assisted coding as normal practice. **Hottest debate:** Whether using AI to write code (even for a security-focused company) is a reasonable modern norm or an unacceptable risk given AI's current reliability. **Open questions** - Will Proton's leadership face any real accountability (board action, CEO departure) for the incident? - How will Proton's shareholder/Foundation structure affect future tradeoffs between growth targets and product trustworthiness? **Highlights** > > an engineer asked for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it, and CEO Andy Yen answered that it was “bullshit and loser thinking” Wow my first exposure to Andy Yen shouldn’t have been this one. I’m seeing a loser here and it’s not the engineer… > — [Mistletoe on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329190) > > Beyond the clumsiness, it shows a leadership that now treats the constraints that made Proton worth paying for as the thing slowing it down. Exactly. The product is security and privacy. The thing being sold is that. If anyone could justify being slower to pentest, it is Proton. I do wonder who would be demanding that Proton move faster. Would any user of their service ask them to sacrifice these attributes? > — [Shank on hackernews · 3 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329313) > > A lot of the reactions treat this as an AI story, as if any AI-written code poisons the well, and I think that misses the point. Engineers using AI to write code is the new norm. It is not the norm for any engineer, or any company, who cares about the quality of the product. I will not say there are zero people who care who are trying to use LLMs to write code, because that isn't true. But neither is it true that most engineers find the tool useful. It is still wildly controversial in the programming community, contrary to what you state here. > For most companies, trading some caution for speed is a reasonable call. That isn't a reasonable call for any business, but it is an especially bad call for a business which sells itself on offering greater security. My issue with what happened at Proton is twofold: first, the CEO treats his workers like dirt. That isn't a company I wish to do business with no matter how good their product is. Second, the CEO is in the full grip of AI psychosis, telling his engineers to use the tool just because it's trendy, not because it actually produces good results. That suggests that the product Proton produces will, sooner rather than later, turn into AI slop, full of bugs. I wouldn't wish to do business with such a company even if the CEO were a nice guy. So Proton now has a product going downhill, and a CEO who is a jerk. I'm not sticking around for that. I could just pay Microsoft if I wanted that kind of experience. > — [bigstrat2003 on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329582) > I'm a paying proton customer, I migrated last year from the horror that is Office365 (or Copilot 365 or whatever they call it now) and before that I migrated from Google Workspace. In direct comparisson, proton is the best product for me - and that does not include privacy or security things, just stuff like generall UX and featureset. Yes, they have some annoying bugs, but so did the others. I think the AI backlash against Proton so far is unwarranted. It is purely speculative and based on make-belief. I am a dev myself, I use AI more and more, and I have no more long-term experience than the next dev. But so far the claim that using AI in your corp and workflow will result in buggier, shitty code is not true on a broad scale. It is certainly not true for proton, at least I don't see service quality detiorating for my service. I think it is a tool, and what you get out of using it still depends on the skill of the craftsman. As a customer, I do demand stable service and the promised saftey and security. But I also demand low prices and a product that can compete with the market. Now, the market is Google and Microsoft - two companies we don't even need to question if they lay off people due to AI usage. Proton is kind of under pressure to compete on a product level in a pretty much david-against-goliath situation. We see AI-assisted exploits such as the Linux use-after-free from Anthropic and can't blame Proton for restructuring their dev process to incorporate AI to find exactly these kind of security issues. I wouldn't even feel comfortable as a client if proton whipped on a "human code only" label on their services. > — [littlecranky67 on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329666) > A company like Proton shouldn't be for-profit to begin with. But in the case it is, it should be run as a careful privately owned business, that takes pride in their products, not a profit machine. It seems the majority owning "foundation" does little to ensure that, if they're not the ones pushing for more profit and faster delivery of crap "Proton was created to serve the world, and the non-profit Proton Foundation ensures that this can never change. As Proton’s primary shareholder, the foundation exercises its control to ensure that Proton does not deviate from our mission to build a better internet that serves the interests of all of society. Our legally binding purpose is to further the advancement of privacy, freedom, and democracy around the world." > — [coldtea on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50329854) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50328488) · 102 points · 118 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Stop Pretending You Trust the Code Your AI Just Wrote](https://daily.dev/posts/stop-pretending-you-trust-the-code-your-ai-just-wrote-z5gqyktus) · Medium · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#security](https://daily.dev/tags/security), [#privacy](https://daily.dev/tags/privacy), [#ai-coding](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-coding), [#code-review](https://daily.dev/tags/code-review) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x"},"datePublished":"2026-11-01T21:01:53.083Z","dateModified":"2026-11-01T21:32:42.439Z","description":"Proton's CEO Andy Yen called an engineer's request for a few days to pentest new code before shipping it 'bullshit and loser thinking', telling the team to...","image":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/435a8f61ab1724d79a3118d70222c476?_a=AQAEuop","thumbnailUrl":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/f_auto,q_auto/v1/posts/435a8f61ab1724d79a3118d70222c476?_a=AQAEuop","isAccessibleForFree":true,"articleSection":"Hacker News","inLanguage":"en","publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180}},"author":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Hacker News","logo":"https://media.daily.dev/image/upload/t_logo,f_auto/v1/logos/hn","url":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},"commentCount":0,"discussionUrl":"https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x","interactionStatistic":[{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"LikeAction"},"userInteractionCount":0},{"@type":"InteractionCounter","interactionType":{"@type":"CommentAction"},"userInteractionCount":0}],"keywords":"security,privacy,ai-coding,code-review","timeRequired":"PT3M"} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https://daily.dev"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Hacker News","item":"https://daily.dev/sources/hn"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":3,"name":"It wasn't AI that flipped Proton's charge"}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"FAQPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/it-wasn-t-ai-that-flipped-proton-s-charge-m2duf5c4x#faq","mainEntity":[{"@type":"Question","name":"What did Proton's CEO say about an engineer's request to pentest code before shipping it?","acceptedAnswer":{"@type":"Answer","text":"Andy Yen reportedly called the request 'bullshit and loser thinking' and told the team to stop 'lovingly handcrafting code' and use AI more instead, according to a 404 Media investigation into Proton's internal Slack. 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