Gitlab Duo

https://about.gitlab.com/gitlab-duo/

by taubek • 2 years ago

105 150 2 years ago

about.gitlab.com

Kelteseth2• 2 years ago

Anyone using this? We use a self-hosted Gitlab for 5 years now and had to upgrade to premium after they killed the basic version. Now I would essentially have to double my spending (again) for this new feature.

palata• 2 years ago

Now I would essentially have to double my spending (again) for this new feature.

I guess either you believe that this AI feature is worth the new prices, or you don't. I don't.

We use a self-hosted Gitlab for 5 years now and had to upgrade to premium after they killed the basic version.

Why not self-hosting an instance of Forgejo?

Kelteseth2• 2 years ago

Yes, Forgejo would be an alternative if we really would need to switch. GitLab pricing is ok for us, not great, not terrible for a small team of 6 devs...

mdaniel4• 2 years ago

Why not self-hosting an instance of Forgejo?

Have they fixed their pseudo-implementation of GitHub Actions? Last I saw they were trying to use nektos/act instead of actually, no kidding, implementing Actions and a real runner. It's the uncanny valley of CICD

jamesponddotco• 2 years ago

Considering they still use Claude 2 as the model for many features, I'd pass. Now, if they upgraded to Claude 3, on the other hand... I would still go with Codeium[1] and the Claude 3 API.

[1]: Which, to be fair, has fewer features.

dnsmichi4• 2 years ago

GitLab team member here. Thanks for your feedback :)

You can follow the migration to Claude 3 in this epic https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/13297

(also shared in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40114647 )

slindsey• 2 years ago

My team recently paid for this on self-hosted GitLab ultimate. I would not suggest this for self-hosted. We've been having issues that seem to be related to self-hosting that are requiring a lot of effort from our System Admins to work through with GitLab support.

Separate from that, there don't appear to be any benefits to having it "integrated" into GitLab. I'm assuming we'll switch to another tool shortly.

fuzzy2• 2 years ago

Just curious: Why not use GitLab Community Edition? At least for me, it had everything I wanted. (Due to feature creep, I no longer use it.)

dnsmichi4• 2 years ago

GitLab team member here. Thanks for your feedback.

GitLab Duo provides AI-assisted features in the DevSecOps lifecycle. GitLab Duo Chat was released as GA last week [0] Code Suggestions are GA, too, and help with code completion and generation [1] The documentation provides more insights on availability and usage [2]

Helpful learning resources:

If you are looking for practical examples and prompt tips for Duo Chat, bookmark this longer tutorial "10 best practices for using AI-powered GitLab Duo Chat" in [3]

We have also updated the documentation to add hands-in GitLab Duo examples for different programming languages and environments, helping with how to integrate AI into your workflows efficiently: [4]

At QCon London 2024 two weeks ago, I spoke about "Efficient DevSecOps workflows with a little help from AI." The slides are publicly available at [5], talk summary in [6]

I also recommend the blog post "How to put generative AI to work in your DevSecOps environment" [7] to tackle important questions such as workflow assessments, AI guardrails and how to measure AI impact in your organization.

Last but not least, I started a learning series called "GitLab Duo Coffee Chat" on YouTube [8], showing AI and GitLab Duo in action. I plan to host more sessions in the coming weeks. [9]

Happy to help with more adoption questions, best practices, and development workflows :-)

[0] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/04/18/gitlab-duo-chat-now...

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/12/22/gitlab-duo-code-sug...

[2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/ai_features.html

[3] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/04/02/10-best-practices-f...

[4] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/gitlab_duo_examples.html

[5] https://go.gitlab.com/ZDYNXQ

[6] https://qconlondon.com/presentation/apr2024/efficient-devsec...

[7] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2024/03/07/how-to-put-generati...

[8] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL05JrBw4t0Kp5uj_JgQiS...

[9] https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-com/marketing/developer-rel...

Etheryte• 2 years ago

Did you use Gitlab Duo to write this comment?

misnome2• 2 years ago

I'm guessing this has come up (again?) now because there has been a "General Availability" in the new 16.11 where it's been apparently automatically turned on in our internal Premium instance (and individual users getting nagged about using it after the upgrade). For "Free":

The GitLab Duo Chat is part of GitLab Duo Pro. To ease the transition for Chat beta users who have yet to purchase GitLab Duo Pro, Duo Chat will remain available to existing Premium and Ultimate customers (without the add-on) for a short period of time. We will announce when access will be restricted to Duo Pro subscribers at a later date.

At least one of our admins interpreted their pinky-promise policy page as something binding; at least from the communications we were sent it seems very hard to verify exactly what they are sending over or protections they've put in place.

It's 2024, not putting that clearly front-and-centre is a deliberate choice.

joshstrange• 2 years ago

Here are the models they use [0]. They best they do is Claude 2, hard pass.

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/ai_features.html#language-mo...

dnsmichi4• 2 years ago

GitLab team member here. Thanks for your feedback.

You can follow the migration to Claude 3 in this public epic: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/13297

yellow_lead• 2 years ago

Ship more secure software faster withAI throughout the entire software development lifecycle

Is this a typo or some sophisticated marketing?

edit- seems to only be a bug in Firefox.

frizlab2• 2 years ago

And Safari

bckr• 2 years ago

And mobile chrome

john_cogs• 2 years ago

GitLab team member here. This is a typo. Will be fixed shortly. Thanks.

bogwog2• 2 years ago

A half-assed feature nobody asked for? In my Gitlab?! Unbelievable!!

On a serious note, wtf Gitlab? Every once in a while I get an email notification from a feature request I subscribed to (that has been open for years) because yet another large premium customer requests that it be implemented. Gitlabs response is always that they don't have capacity/manpower to implement it, yet they're able to implement crap like this?

andybak• 2 years ago

Are your features potentially new revenue streams? This is. Or at least they believe it can be.

richbell• 2 years ago

I'm sure their investors believe announcing something with "AI" will increase the value.

pid-12• 2 years ago

~5 years ago GitLab had many features that distinguished itself from competition, chiefly their CI/CD stuff. It was leagues above of what everyone offered.

They've spent the last years building stuff I don't care while not improving the stuff I care. During this period, GitHub built Actions.

Nowadays GitLab is more expensive than GitHub (GitLab Premium vs GitHub Enterprise) while also not having any particular feature that makes me want to use it over GitHub. If I was starting a software team today, there is no reason I'd be using GitLab.

In the long term their strategy of having too many half assed features might bite back instead of generating revenue streams.

keybored• 2 years ago

I don’t know if this is half-assed. But the presentation certainly is.

    Why Gitlab Duo : AI :sparkles:

yjftsjthsd-h• 2 years ago

I don't know, isn't that exactly explanation of why they did it? (Joking but also 100% dead serious)

candiddevmike• 2 years ago

I wrote a (satirical?) blog post about this behavior: https://candid.dev/blog/becoming-an-ai-company/

Every company seems to be throwing their backlog away and focusing on adding AI features no one asked for. Could be a lot of opportunity for startups that actually listen to their end users to gain some traction instead of chasing GenAI.

bogwog2• 2 years ago

Could be a lot of opportunity for startups that actually listen to their end users to gain some traction instead of chasing GenAI.

This made me actually look into it instead of just complaining on the internet. The feature I was referring to was the Conan package repository[1]. Apparently, Forgejo implemented support for that already[2], as well as other features that originally drew me to Gitlab in the first place.

I think it may be time to consider switching.

1: https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/6816

2: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/packages/conan/

sdesol• 2 years ago

A half-assed feature nobody asked for?

I'll put money on it that Enterprise customers asked for this. The half-assed part, I can't comment on.

xyst3• 2 years ago

Back to self hosting my code.

Side note: Gitlab is one of the few companies to provide a self hosted version of their VCS.

https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/install/requirements.html

Also gitea is a much more lightweight option and can use sqlite for db. Much easier to deploy on a rpi

petepete• 2 years ago

Soft serve is lighter still.

https://github.com/charmbracelet/soft-serve

xyst3• 2 years ago

Ooh this is very nice. Might use this for private projects.

Problem with this is that it’s likely very unfamiliar with most folks. At least with gitea or gl-ce, there’s a familiar interface 99% of developers can use to browse and search code.

Like if I want to share a quick nixOS config, I doubt most people would even be willing to pull the code and only browse via web interface.

rigid3• 2 years ago

not sure how lightweight any of these are, but https://gitolite.com/gitolite/ just needs git and ssh deployed. And it works like a charm.

pjot• 2 years ago

Are you concerned at all about the raspi’s sd card corrupting/failing? I’d feel like this would always be at the back of my mind

jsheard• 2 years ago

You don't have to run a Pi from an SD card nowadays, and shouldn't do if you can help it. They've supported USB boot for a while and the Pi5 can also boot from an NVMe SSD hooked up to the exposed PCIe lane.

seanmceligot• 2 years ago

This happened to me Tuesday September 28th 2001 at 3:30pm. I know because I never rewrote the complicated e-paper code that I lost when my SD card died without a backup :(

xnyan• 2 years ago

As others have said, Pi now supports USB boot. An inexpensive USB to sata adaptor and a 128GB SSD (~$15) is the most inexpensive option to get started and performs very well.

xyst3• 2 years ago

I run my rp5 off of nvme

strogonoff• 2 years ago

Sourcehut is great, and I doubt Drew would take the hosted version in that direction.

Zambyte5• 2 years ago

Yeah, seems unlikely[0]

[0] https://drewdevault.com/2023/08/29/2023-08-29-AI-crap.html

AnthOlei• 2 years ago

Gerrit for really fine grained control

itherseed• 2 years ago

OneDev is really slim and have all I need to start. https://github.com/theonedev/onedev

Zambyte5• 2 years ago

I am of the school of thought that you should be using multiple remotes anyways. I don't think there is a good reason not to. Codeburg and, as another mentioned, Sourcehut may be good places to host your code in addition to your self hosted remote.

Radicle[0] is also a really interesting option.

[0] https://radicle.xyz/

remram15• 2 years ago

I can't wait to check out Radicle again, 1.0 seems imminent. I wonder how usable the average developer will find it.

thiht7• 2 years ago

If you're concerned, you should switch the license of your code, not really where you host it. As long as your license allows LLM/AI models to train on your code, why would you be mad that it does?

xigoi5• 2 years ago

My code has a license that disallows using it to create proprietary software, but it seems that proprietary LLMs are still being trained on it.

remram15• 2 years ago

Almost none of the common licenses allow this, because at the very least they have an attribution requirement. Licenses are being ignored.

danirod• 2 years ago

Also gitea is a much more lightweight option and can use sqlite for db. Much easier to deploy on a rpi

Worth mentioning Forgejo as well (https://forgejo.org), which is Codeberg's fork of Gitea. Same features and as lightweight as Gitea. Hard-forked a couple of months ago after some transparency concerns from the new parent company that owns Gitea now.

remram15• 2 years ago

Isn't it just the same thing with a different name? Why is it worth mentioning at this point in time?

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

Is this the thing that keeps sending me pointless AI summaries of code reviews that people have made in our project?

Meanwhile all of the fancy security features, for which we pay a massive premium as they're only included in the Ultimate tier, are completely broken and I have to keep explaining to my team members why GitLab keeps falsely insisting their merge requests are full of security vulnerabilities.

TrianguloY• 2 years ago

What's with the fading on each element while scrolling? Make the page impossible to fast-read or scan for important points. ...maybe that's the reason?

remram15• 2 years ago

From that page:

Will my code be used for training AI models?
GitLab does not train generative AI models based on private (non-public) data. The vendors we work with also do not train models based on private data.

So they will steal your code if it is public, ignoring license. Understood.

arwineap• 2 years ago

Given that it's public, yes, gitlab as well as every other model on earth will be trained from it.

Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not.

Honestly, I find it comforting that gitlab is at least being straightforward about it

cbsmith• 2 years ago

Is it right? I don't know. Can we stop it? Absolutely not.

Depends on what you mean by "stop it". Patents are public, but it's hard to employ them for commercial purpose without an agreement from the owner.

bondarchuk• 2 years ago

I would not call that straightforward. Being straightforward would mean including something like "we & our vendors might (or will) train generative AI models based on public data", instead of letting us infer that for ourselves.

freedomben2• 2 years ago

Straightforward? I very much disagree.

You could maybe convince me that it is straightforward when measured against only corporate speak, but if not looked at as corporate speak it is very much not straightforward. Straightforward would be an explicit "Yes, we train from public code regardless of the license"

calvinmorrison3• 2 years ago

arghwhat3• 2 years ago

Just in case people didn't know, the phrase "all rights reserved" does not have any legal consequence (in the early days of copyright people felt it was necessary, but all rights are automatically granted), and uploading content to Github means that you must also license it to Github and other Github users as per the ToS. It is your responsibility to ensure that you can grant that license.

https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/github-terms/github-t...

In addition, one has to consider whether the act of studying a project whose sources you have legally obtained to gain experiences applied in other contexts where the original license may not apply or be upheld is an issue. This applies to humans as much as to ML.

remram15• 2 years ago

I don't understand, software heritage doesn't make derivatives or remove the attached license.

pryelluw2• 2 years ago

I’ve been feeling more and more that we should reconsider open source licenses to protect our rights as authors from LLM vendors. I’m not against them basing their models on my work. I do have reservations on them generating their models on my work and creating derivative works without respecting the license. It’s why I’ve started to use the MIT license less and less and have adopted various from the GPL family. Models trained in OSS should be open sourced IMO.

toastal• 2 years ago

https://github.com/non-ai-licenses/non-ai-licenses

These aren’t official (& hosted on a different, proprietary data siphoner), but there are attempts to add anti-AI clauses.

yencabulator• 2 years ago

If they're not respecting MIT's attribution requirement for derived works, why would they respect GPL?

remram15• 2 years ago

AI companies believe copyright doesn't apply and all this is fair use or transformative enough. If copyright doesn't apply they are not bound by license terms either.

bastardoperator2• 2 years ago

The license in your repo is entirely meaningless when you grant an exclusive license to places like GitLab and GitHub to "display" your code.

oooyay• 2 years ago

One simple solution is just don't open source. A lot of folks forget that many open source licenses were produced to be "business friendly" to encourage participation by the private sector. The private sector, however, has largely done the bare minimum unless profit was involved. Then they'd either co-opt the project or fork it to their own ends in pursuit of profit with minimal returns to the original project WRT their gains.

That's a long way of saying, for what open source is and was, a lot of projects are mislicensed when juxtaposed to their goals and needs. It's okay to sell your software, it's okay to be "source available", it's okay to be entirely proprietary.

golergka3• 2 years ago

If a person can read it and learn from it, AI should be able to do the same.

freedomben2• 2 years ago

I agree. Given the effort that has been put in to ensure code isn't copied verbatim, I don't see much of a philosophic difference between a human doing it or AI doing it.

That said I think it's weasely that they would just explicitly say it. It's obviously a question a lot of people have if it's in the FAQs, and a non-answer like, "we never train on private code" is ridiculous.

oblio4• 2 years ago

There's a valid moral question here, in short: why?

I care about helping other people.

Helping some type of amoral entity that's usually controlled by another amoral for-profit entity: why would I help those?

ikari_pl• 2 years ago

i would prefer it to learn from better verified solutions, reviewed and battle tested.

Instead I get AI companions writing comments like "This code is unintelligible and batshit complicated, kill it with fire" when I was hoping for a doc string

jayd16• 2 years ago

If it's patented they can't use it...

If it's a copy left license I would say that at that point anything made by the ai should be copy left as well.

Just because you think a machine should have the right to use open source code doesn't mean the author or the license agree.

remram15• 2 years ago

That's a claim not an argument. Why do you believe this? Why should we?

xigoi5• 2 years ago

People are not software.

jacooper• 2 years ago

This is for the supreme Court to decide, till then, its assumed to be fair use by these companies.

rickydroll• 2 years ago

I don't think licensing issues are important in this context. I have never gotten code from an LLM system that wasn't something I would create myself if I taken the time to write it manually. You should be thinking of LLM coding assistance as a junior programmer working for you with all of the pluses and minuses. If someone claims they found code from open source project in the output of an LLM, it is most likely the result of over constraining the specification i.e. I want you to make me painting that looks just like the Mona Lisa.

carimura• 2 years ago

Wow those code comments the AI generated were so helpful!

  // Assign the number 5 to the integer x
  int x = 5;

syndicatedjelly• 2 years ago

Examples like this make it clear who GitLab Duo’s target audience really is.

cal85• 2 years ago

Who?

nikola522• 2 years ago

did you get that in your workspace?

olejorgenb2• 2 years ago

We've tried this out for some weeks at my company and concluded it's not ready yet.

As someone else mentioned they don't use state of the art models: https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/ai_features.html#language-mo... (though they are working on using Claude 3)

The completion plugin for the JetBrain IDEs (pycharm tested) appear to be very barebones, and judging by the results - does not seem to take advantage of the context beyond the current file in a good way. One of my colleges say the 2.x version is better though.

We were excited about the possibilities for MR and issue integration, but using it for this is IMO totally useless at the moment. Last I checked some of this will also only be available to Ultimate customers.

bufferoverflow• 2 years ago

Claude isn't open source. Doesn't that, by definition, mean that they leak your code to Anthropic?

olejorgenb2• 2 years ago

Upgraded the plugin today. Using the new chat sidepanel just work forever without any results when trying the "explain" and "generate test" commands.

bdcravens• 2 years ago

Now I suppose it's the chance for Github to publish a "we did it first!" blog post (as is common for Gitlab to publish)

TechTechTech• 2 years ago

I run a self hosted Gitlab CE instance for many years now and I am very happy with it. I also experiment a lot with local LLMs. Will there be a CE release which allows for usage combined with a locally running LLM in the future?

mdaniel4• 2 years ago

Since the relevant code appears to be in the "ee" directory <https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/blob/v16.11.0-ee/ee/l...> and is not present in the foss repo, I'm guessing the answer is no, at least for now. They do have a history of "releasing" features from EE back to CE but my suspicion is not for LLM stuff

a2128• 2 years ago

The only AI I'll ever use is CodeBERG AI: https://codeberg.org/Codeberg-Infrastructure/forgejo/pulls/8...

ametrau• 2 years ago

Why?

h4ch1• 2 years ago

This PR seems to be an April Fool's joke mimicking how GitHub advertises copilot :)

skywhopper• 2 years ago

Digging around in the demo videos and assuming they chose some ideal examples for their marketing material, this doesn't really live up to the hype. The "generate a code review summary" adds stuff like "I estimate my comments will not take much time to implement" when the comments are stuff like "consider using a stored procedure for this calculation". And the "explain this code to me" feature misinterprets things, even in their demo, where it "explained" that the highlighted code was in a method with an entirely different name. The explanation also goes overboard in discussing where the code is located in the project, and skips over stuff like "where does this feature flag come from, exactly?" and is clearly making (reasonable with these names, but method names can often be misleading without context) assumptions about what methods named "listProducts()" and "listSorted()" do.

gregoriol• 2 years ago

Gitlab really should stop adding features: the thing is bloated with tons of menus and options that most users don't use or understand. PMs seem to need to do PM, stop them, listen to tech people.

q0uaur2• 2 years ago

for private use or even small teams it's way too late for that, but honestly it seems they're just focusing on enterprise use and i'm kinda glad something open source and self-hostable for that market exists. we're already wayy too dependent on microsoft, but at least my workplace's code can stay local for now.

firemelt2• 2 years ago

please raise the price coz I need to pay for features that I don't need and don't use :)

remram15• 2 years ago

They increased it more than 50% last year [1]

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2023/03/02/gitlab-premium-upda...

solatic• 2 years ago

They have product managers doing product management; you're no longer the audience.

Mature Enterprise products will have so many obscure and random features that you practically need certification to understand all of them; but most end-users are not supposed to understand all of them. They just want to understand the ones that affect them. The fact that the features offered are maybe 50% as good (if that) as the ones offered by competing products is completely besides the Actual Value Proposition available to users who get hired to work inside BigEnterprise, which is the following choice:

  a) Use a 50%-as-good product that is already installed and supported and by internal team;
  b) Take the hard road to try to get a new product in: find the budget for a new product, convince the internal (IT?) team to install and maintain it, get them to integrate it with the rest of the BigEnterprise's systems (at least stuff like user management and sending emails), get the new product through Procurement processes.

Is it any wonder that 99% of the time, BigEnterprise employees choose (a) ?

Product strategy when selling to these customers is: be the default choice, not the best choice. Get internal enterprise users to keep choosing (a). Eventually, so much internal enterprise usage depends on 50%-utility features, that anyway the system becomes nearly impossible to rip out, and then you can start to put in yearly price increases that they can't stop paying.

As long as you have a mainline feature that is best-in-class to get your foot in the door with new customers (so that their users can start using the 50%-utility features), you have a coherent product strategy. GitLab's best-in-class mainline feature is the combination of Git repository hosting + GitLab CI; their closest competitor is GitHub Enterprise which is more expensive (also GitHub Actions sucks), and Bitbucket is a sad joke.

nikola522• 2 years ago

"Listen to tech people" reminded me of this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oeqPrUmVz-o

lxe• 2 years ago

I just want a copilot-like autocomplete and chat plugin that uses the standard oai api so I can hook it up to any local model.

firemelt2• 2 years ago

clippy died for this

harshitaneja• 2 years ago

No one has mentioned this yet, but their pricing is twice of what I pay for github copilot. What does it offer that's substantially better than copilot?

Hamuko2• 2 years ago

If the past is any indication, no. GitLab Ultimate is $100/user/month whereas GitHub Enterprise with the Advanced Security addon is about $70/user/month. Well, at least Ultimate used to be $100 before they hid the prices from the pricing page. Could be even more for all I know. And yet, the base product you get isn't really significantly better than GitHub, and using it day-to-day professionally, has quite a lot of bugs too.

Gitlab Duo

Related Stories