GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

by AnonGitLabEmpl • 2 months ago

703 657 2 months ago

about.gitlab.com

AnonGitLabEmpl• 2 months ago

Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.

sausagefeet• 2 months ago

At least they are honest about it:

The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.

No good way to execute lay-offs, my preference would be to do it like a band-aid. What use is it to do it in open unless they plan on having gladiatorial matches to keep your job. Otherwise it's just like a painful game of Duck Duck Goose.

knollimar2• 2 months ago

the people who would leave after a layoff can do so preemptively, perhaps saving headcount for someone else?

MeetingsBrowser2• 2 months ago

sort of a Michael Scott approach of asking people to quit so they don't have to fire anyone.

haute_cuisine3• 2 months ago

Can someone explain why they're using terms like "voluntary separation window" instead of more natural language?

reaperducer• 2 months ago

Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.

Plenty of time to whip up a dead man's switch.

arm32• 2 months ago

Time to tell everybody about Forgejo, again.

TranquilMarmot• 2 months ago

Seriously, I moved all of my personal projects to a self-hosted Forgejo and all my open-source projects to Codeberg and haven't looked back.

dewey3• 2 months ago

The market for people paying for Gitlab (Which feels more like GitHub but for Enterprise these days) is probably not even slightly overlapping with the market for people running Forgejo.

sschueller2• 2 months ago

As soon as they support groups/folders I will switch. But I can't as my gitlab is all setup in many folders and sub projects.

Having to rewrite all my CI will suck but will be worth it.

ReptileMan2• 2 months ago

TLDR: Because of AI the future belongs to the engineers, so we took the noble decision to stop hoarding them on our payroll and make sure there are enough to go around for the other companies.

bigbuppo4• 2 months ago

I think they had more employees than customers.

mattas• 2 months ago

Here's their soon to be updated(?) handbook with the CREDIT values:

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/

jrochkind15• 2 months ago

Soon to be updated, maybe not on the open web, cause Transparency is leaving...

skrrtww• 2 months ago

A lot of the conclusions they're drawing in this post about the "agentic era" seem quite misguided and some don't really seem to make sense.

I have no doubt GitLab has too many employees and can benefit from being a more focused company, but it's tiring reading these layoff posts so chock full of buzzwords. I guess they're desperately hoping if they prognosticate about AI enough it will placate the investors.

ai_fry_ur_brain2• 2 months ago

Let these people keep betting their companies, futures and net competency on text autocomplete. The future is bright for me and everyone else that isn't falling for it.

u_fucking_dork9• 2 months ago

Calling it text autocomplete is played out and really just makes you look bad at this point.

stx53• 2 months ago

What makes you think you're anything more than a 'text autocompleter'? You are justing auto completing someone's comment

dboreham• 2 months ago

"Text autocomplete" is literally what you just did.

__mharrison__• 2 months ago

My comment is the autocompletion to your prompt.

lazzlazzlazz• 2 months ago

Insane to see this kind of comment on Hacker News. I suspect it's satire!

jpadkins3• 2 months ago

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.

tootie2• 2 months ago

The memo also says they're eliminating a lot of middle management tiers which has been a theme for a lot of companies recently. It's also been a theme historically. Really has nothing to do with AI. It's just the classic executive view that they are paying people who sit in meetings and write emails instead of writing code. Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.

DaSHacka• 2 months ago

Blissfully unaware that meetings and emails are how big organizations function.

I don't know, I've seen more big organizations that have a dysfunctional amount of middle management and "meetings about meetings" than ones that truly benefit from that culture.

siva74• 2 months ago

Your argument doesn't make sense. They literally explained why they are doing it. They are looking to remove who can't or won't keep up with ai. That can be managers but also engineers. That's what most companies right now are doing.

internet101010• 2 months ago

And people wonder why there is so much push back against AI. The last thing leadership should do when laying off people is use the term AI. It's the most tone deaf thing you can do.

franga2000• 2 months ago

We don't live in the same world as they do. Saying AI out loud makes line go up, not down. Investors are still eating this shit up, for now at least...

laweijfmvo• 2 months ago

there’s a familiar saying “Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.” i think that applies here as well. everyone (customers) want AI; investors demand it. it may eventually calm down but i’m sure many companies will be left behind and ultimately fade away if they don’t keep up until then.

mirekrusin5• 2 months ago

I don't think anything is going to calm down.

Models will only get better with time, not worse.

Demand will keep raising.

morningsam2• 2 months ago

some don't really seem to make sense.

This one stood out to me:

Machine-scale infrastructure. [...] Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. [...] Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale.

Git itself is so far down the list of bottlenecks that do or could hamper LLM-driven development, even projecting years into the future...

lbotos2• 2 months ago

I wholeheartedly disagree.

Git has always been one of the biggest perf bottlenecks inside of the product.

First for any scaled deploy we recommended NFS. We were young and dumb and it was too slow. (We’ve all been there)

Then we went to an RPC model with gitaly and even unwrapped some of the git calls inside of that to speed it up.

Just a few months ago we had a large customer with thousands of devs and a large monorepo ground their deployments to a halt because of a cloning strategy change that introduced an accidental 10x in git calls. Git itself was the bottleneck because it’s not designed for this scale and speed.

For enterprises where thousands of developers are contributing code via git to a centralized system of record, who are firing off 1000s of CI jobs Git is absolutely a bottleneck.

Now with LLM technologies we should easily expect a 5-20x code volume increase on the conservative side. Git is being stretched to its perf limits.

(Source: see my profile)

jameskilton• 2 months ago

A reminder that every line of code written is a liability, not an asset.

If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.

petetnt• 2 months ago

With it’s current AI setup GitLab still couldn’t make anything that could be called great in UX so I can’t wait to see what they can do by eliminating the remaining human factor. Can’t personally wait seeing tickets like these [0] open for months with bots telling you that everything will be alright.

[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806

Banditoz• 2 months ago

Small aside, if they're dropping their transparency company value does that mean that issue won't be visible anymore? Is that the future for Gitlab?

whalesalad• 2 months ago

fwiw when using pgbouncer i find that disabling in-app connection pooling has improved performance. a pool on top of a pool is diminishing returns.

verall• 2 months ago

That issue looks like it was filed 3 months ago and there has been active development debugging and trying to fix it the whole time?

I dunno, at mag7 i see painful infra bugs sitting on the vine for years... maybe my bar is low, but that bug looks like a good response

keyle• 2 months ago

How these companies act like these changes are for the better good and how "we are different" is just gross.

    The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.

Not even the balls to do the deed yourself. This reads like Shrek's "Some of you may die,... but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

"Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.

ams92• 2 months ago

What a shock, company whose share price is in the shitter lays people off and blames AI.

pargon2• 2 months ago

I assume my company's annual bill will be streamlined accordingly.

relaxatorium• 2 months ago

Nah, AI's gonna let them ship more and more features you don't use so they can keep jacking the price up.

Animats• 2 months ago

Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency.

New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.

In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.

IshKebab4• 2 months ago

I'm firmly not in Trump's anti-DEI camp but I have seen what can happen when you make it one of your core values. You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things. It's unlikely that a company like Gitlab really needs anything changing anyway.

It doesn't make sense for it to be 40% of their values, especially if they're losing money (or very close to it).

tdb78932• 2 months ago

Places I've worked that actually seem to have inclusion as a core value are great places to work and seem to have high functioning teams. My impression mostly though is more that it was never really a value for management but they wasted a bunch of time talking about it. In general any mismatch between stated values and actual values has been awful to deal with and is a red flag for places to work.

whimblepop4• 2 months ago

You can end up with a lot of people talking about it a lot, lots of meetings and initiatives rather than doing actual work. And usually those don't go anywhere because the people doing it don't have any power to actually change things.

Someone I'm close to is going through this right now. They work at a place that officially highly values "inclusion", and their employer's website is dripping with virtue-signaling language related to it. But that someone is disabled, and in fact there's nobody at the organization who owns accessibility issues. Disability accommodations are haphazard, and often not timely. Why? Because no one owns them. They just get punted to an internal employee affinity group of disabled people who don't have a real chain of command, a real budget, or even a real prerogative to do accessibility work, let alone meaningful power— many of its members are routinely chastised by their bosses whenever they dedicate any time to solving access problems within the company. "That's not what we pay your for", "that's not your job", "I need you on this other thing", etc.

Meanwhile the organization receives public accolades from meaningless business press organization as a "great place to work" or even "great place to work for people with disabilities".

I think it's fine for companies to value diversity, and to value it publicly. A little virtue signaling is fine, as a treat; it may actually repel nasty people, encourage good behavior, or make employees feel more welcome sometimes. That stuff is good.

But there's also a real possibility that a company making diversity an explicit value results in lots of energy going into activities that let that company's executives pat themselves on the back about how good they are without actually doing much for inclusion. I wouldn't take any sizeable company's stated values too seriously, including that one.

janalsncm• 2 months ago

On the one hand, yeah, you should respect people who are different from you. On the other hand, this is really so obvious that I doubt elevating it to a “core value” makes much of a difference. Are there marginal people who wouldn’t respect diversity unless it was a core value?

Then again I don’t even know what it means for something to be a core value. What is the practical upshot of “collaboration” being a core value of a company? Were people not collaborating before?

bigstrat2003• 2 months ago

I think "inclusion" is fine as a value. "Diversity" is not, because it is an outcome and not an action one pursues. What matters is that all have equal opportunities to participate, and perfectly fair opportunities can create unequal outcomes through no fault of anyone's. Moreover, I think that fixating on the demographics of who joins the company is morally misguided. I want my teammates to be capable and enjoyable to work with, not to check someone's "we must have X number of minorities checkbox". Diversity initiatives always turn into the latter in my experience.

dangus4• 2 months ago

I will push back on what you are saying here. I think this idea that DEI becomes "yet another annoying meeting" has been amplified by political media. This political media has successfully grown the seed of this idea in our heads that DEI is just useless nonsense, and it's associated with those "liberals who want to take your freedom and guns and tax money and jobs."

Essentially, what's happening here is that this right wing political media saw an opportunity to latch onto resentment of employees whose companies were just trying to change employee behavior for the better.

Companies are well aware that implementing DEI successfully will financially outperform other companies who don't. McKinsey has found this to be true repeatedly. But of course, people don't really want to hear these kinds of things and a lot of socially conservative people don't like being told that they need to learn how to interact with that queer looking person they'd rather just avoid. When Jim and Bob want to hire a new employee they just want to hire another Jim or another Bob and be left alone.

You know how your company puts meetings on your calendar where they preach about wellness and exercise and stuff like that? Just because they are annoying meetings doesn't mean they're wrong. You should focus on your wellness and exercise. Same deal with DEI: it's obviously beneficial to everyone, but America has a whole lot of people who really don't want it.

We are within the same lifetime as full blown segregation, redlining, of women being disallowed from opening bank accounts without spousal approval. There are people still alive from that era. Your great-great-grandparent may have been alive during legal racial slavery.

jrochkind15• 2 months ago

Also no more Transparency.

echelon2• 2 months ago

If they're asking you to do more for less pay and with fewer coworkers to help, don't feel bad if the company code turns into unmaintainable, unintelligible garbage. They can't really stop you. It's just AI. Something is going to have to give.

Every IC ought to use the present day as the opportunity to build a nimble competitor to their old employer (or whatever industry incumbents they want).

They're literally setting themselves up for this.

darkwater5• 2 months ago

Which I wonder if it will end with closing up their own public Gitlab instance for their bugs/features, their open operations manual and the generally transparent culture that for example brought us the live streamed fix of the infamous "I dropped the database" situation.

Well, actually looks like the live stream was made already private, but I don't know when, I just discovered it now: https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/5rfvpd/live_strea...

Trasmatta2• 2 months ago

Ownership Mindset

Every company I've worked at hammers the "ownership" idea and I hate it so much. It's how they drive a culture where employees are expected to invest themselves into "owning" a problem space that can be taken from them at any moment. It's how they trick you into doing extra work that's not in your job description.

Unless you're ACTUALLY an owner, don't be fooled by an "ownership" value.

saganus• 2 months ago

Conversely, you have "full ownership" and have the ability to decide the direction, as long as it's the same direction as your higher-ups have decided.

All the responsibility is still yours though.

trhway3• 2 months ago

Owner is the one who gets the added value assigned to. At least according to the Das Kapital. So the check is easy - do you see the added value flowing onto your account or not.

kajman2• 2 months ago

"Speed with quality" combined with that says a lot. Sounds to me like it will be the base expectation that their remaining developers slop out features in record time. Any failures will be theirs to "own" personally.

arcticbunny• 2 months ago

You need to take the mercenary mindset and look after You Inc. first

j-bos• 2 months ago

I read this and often think, yes, yes we know, but then I hear juniors at work taking these ideas at face value without considering things like stock splitting and preferred shares.

crote11• 2 months ago

Ownership implies both accountability and agency. In practice you often get all of the accountability, none of the agency.

seanp2k2• 2 months ago

Another term for it is "accountability laundering" https://fortune.com/2026/03/05/mobile-world-congress-account...

It's the norm at Big Tech these days. Directors and VPs take all the glory if it goes well while ICs, team leads, and people managers get all of the blame if it doesn't. When the charlatans get exposed, they bounce on to the next company with their charlatan friends. Rinse and repeat while swapping RSUs for index funds, retire with >$10m before 50. If we stopped allowing this to work in our industry, it wouldn't be such a common thing. Unfortunately, with how everything is these days, these people are getting hired on vibes and bravado.

geodel• 2 months ago

Heh, tell me about it. This "ownership" thing is some Grade A bullshit. I see at workplace, all the autonomy on deciding any part of technical solution is taken away but on the other hand I have to take ownership of all consequences of their half-assed decisions.

I think same group of management consultants do a round of industry and in short time every company is using same duplicitous language of ownership, design thinking, customer first mindset, cloud first, cloud native, AI native, enterprise 2.0...and on and on it goes.

2ndorderthought4• 2 months ago

Basically "screw any part about employees working together do what I say fast". What a shame. I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".

echelon2• 2 months ago

The code and product will turn to shit, and the company won't be able to extract itself from the mud.

Employees tasked with doing 10x more work with less help don't even have to feel bad about it happening. It'll also create employment opportunity in disrupting their old employer.

These companies are willingly signing up to become IBM.

wiseowise7• 2 months ago

I love the AI bros who think utopia is coming, 4 day work weeks, etc. more like "get screwed, work more, for less, in worse environments".

Where do you find those, seriously? That might’ve been the case a couple of years ago, where they’ve gaslighted people and played on their feelings, but now gloves are off. AI bros are literally posting about lack of sleep, dopamine hits, vibe coding on a toilet/walk/watching TV, FOMO is through the roof everywhere, prophesying doom of SE, etc.

torben-friis2• 2 months ago

There's a 'github down' post here every other day.

The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal, and they just have to position themselves as "we're the stable ones" to score that market when the exodus inevitably happens.

Nope, full throttle and stimulants, just because.

walrus014• 2 months ago

TBH the open source nature of gitlab means that any sufficiently large and clued-in hosting company (think: servercentral/deft/summit, whatever it's calling itself these days, or one of its competitors) could put up gitlab instances for people to use and meet more nines of uptime than github. It doesn't have to be the gitlab company itself running servers with the httpd and back-end database.

I understand the meaning, however, in that they're well positioned by having the company name and domain name, same general way that non-technical people will pay wordpress.com to host their blog/small website because it's very easy, rather than DIYing it or paying a 3rd party.

zelphirkalt4• 2 months ago

This is what happens, when decision makers are out of touch.

So many things they could be doing, to make people buy into their services. For example they could simply run campaigns about how they promise to never use customer and user repositories for AI training. Or they could show better uptime statistics. Their CI language is better than Github's too.

If anyone gave me a choice between Gitlab and Github, I would go with Gitlab. But if I had additionally the choice to use Codeberg, I would choose that.

Maybe they are just not looking to grow. If they made such a statement, that would actually be a pleasant surprise. No hunger for "infinite exponential growth", just to impress investors? Great! That's a fat plus in my book!

mkozlows• 2 months ago

The big thing on their roadmap is rearchitecting for something that can handle the increased load, though. Like, they're clearly paranoid that if they don't move fast, they're going to be just as busted as Github.

cheema33• 2 months ago

The ball is right there, bouncing alone in front of the goal

Their pitch is not to you, the dev. But, to the investor class. We are in this funny place in the market where you can make more money by catering to the investor class than to customers. In other words, an upside down world.

semiquaver6• 2 months ago

GitLab was never going to be the ones to take the mantle GitHub left on the ground. They’re a “clone” company and have very few original ideas of their own.

-warren• 2 months ago

I hear you my friend.

We've all heard the joke about two people running from a bear and only one has to be less eaten than the other.

This is a race to the bottom. We shall see who winds.

conartist6• 2 months ago

But you know you can move quickly and purposefully when you have 60 fully independent teams each with full ownership and all moving at top speed.

nashadelic• 2 months ago

Yeah it’s “the world is becoming machine coded” and “we’re reducing by 30%” at the same time, like they don’t believe in their own words

reddozen• 2 months ago

I still have gitlab pegged in my mind as the company that rm -rf'd their production database TWICE separately and lost pull requests.

kelvinjps10• 2 months ago

I thought that the GitHub degrading would be an opportunity for them to be an alternative more focused in stability and a customer centric approach . But it's just more slop

u_fucking_dork9• 2 months ago

Why would they want to become the target for free users vibe coded slopware? I don’t think many of them are converting to paying customers.

mrbungie• 2 months ago

Investors actually want slop-branded AI on everything right now, so it checks out for companies to maximize for it. We are so fucked.

PradeetPatel• 2 months ago

There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.

Does anyone know what caused this?

MayCXC• 2 months ago

outcomes

walrus014• 2 months ago

United States domestic "politics" and just about everything adjacent to a certain well known public figure..

gsinclair• 2 months ago

I think you need to make a case for DEI being “one of the industry’s greatest strengths”. It’s not obvious to me.

crote11• 2 months ago

Big Tech CEOs having a front-row seat at Trump's 47 inauguration should give you a decent hint: they bribed the right people, so now they get to enjoy the kickbacks. There's no risk of being regulated to death right now, so there's no need to pretend having the same values the Democrats pretend to have.

Corporate DEI was never real. There's no "push against" it, simply because there was never a genuine push for it. Large companies don't have moral values - if they did their CEOs wouldn't be billionaires.

SilverElfin• 2 months ago

Most DEI programs at big companies ended up setting goals based on things like race and sex. Zealots in HR departments then started implementing programs to change hiring and promotion and compensation to implement progressive identity politics at work, under the DEI label. These things happened in secret, because the companies didn’t like to highlight how being the wrong race or sex means your career is worse off.

That’s totally illegal and discriminatory but companies were not facing consequences for it under the Biden administration. The constant injection of DEI politics all over society - at work, in movies, in ads, etc - led to a backlash and personally I think it is one of the things that led to someone like Trump being re-elected. And this administration is very against DEI ideology. That’s one reason corporations quickly abandoned it - they didn’t want to face legal scrutiny now.

Another is that DEI culture produced no positive results, as expected. Companies already had incentives to hire the best employees they can. If you change that with other incentives thrown in, it’ll make things worse. And ten years after DEI began to appear everywhere, it was obvious it produced no benefit at best, and led to worse teams at worst.

Another reason is simply that a lot of the activists pushing this type of ideology grew out of the activist age group. And I think many of them likely don’t hold those beliefs as strongly anymore. But either way, younger people are different. Especially young males who are more conservative.

All of that and other things has led to DEI being removed or at least de emphasized.

greenchair• 2 months ago

industry's greatest strength? where did that idea come from? hiring a bunch of didnt earn its based on race or sex? would you want your brain surgeon to be dei or do you want someone who is really good at the job?

xdennis• 2 months ago

There seems to be a massive push against DEI over the last few years in the tech industry globally, despite it being one of the industry's greatest strength.

Okay, I'll bite. Why is it a strength, and why is it the greatest strength?

All people are equal, so it shouldn't matter if you have an all Asian team, an all black team, or any mix of all races.

spaqin• 2 months ago

I think the industry's greatest strength is actually outsourcing bulk of the work to culturally homogeneous, cheaper labor countries of Eastern Europe and South [East] Asia.

mns• 2 months ago

Yes, MONEY. Companies and their management couldn't care less about DEI, they care about pleasing whoever in in power in order to get benefits and make as much money as they can. You could literally have Hitler in power now and you would see what companies would do for their survival.

NewJazz2• 2 months ago

Also stop talking to your colleagues and start talking to "ai".

digitaltrees2• 2 months ago

I think you mean no more humans. Gross

LastTrain3• 2 months ago

So, SQUOMCO?

x0x0• 2 months ago

"Speed with Quality"

Having been in some of these values meetings, I really imagine it went like this: someone wanted speed, and someone else wanted quality. Sorry, I mean Speed and Quality. Many people said there is a tradeoff between those two things, and only one thing can be first.

Some brilliant businessman: "I know, we'll combine them. We want Speed _and_ Quality." Thus, "Speed with Quality." Tada!

Values are a tradeoff: only one thing can be first. Trying to duck that is stupid.

p1necone• 2 months ago

The funny thing is you absolutely can do things which improve both speed and quality at the same time (basic good engineering), but they're like 3 or 4 orders of effect removed from those outcomes and impossible to do when you have someone breathing down your neck asking "does this make us go faster" at every step of the way.

Also "our velocity is 3x higher than it would be in the imaginary invisible universe where we made worse decisions 6 months ago" is impossible to measure, whereas "we cut a bunch of corners and shipped a piece of garbage on an arbitrary deadline" is very measurable.

vlod• 2 months ago

Speed-Quality-Price.

Let's pick: Speed-Quality

Errrh... Let's forget about: Price

anal_reactor2• 2 months ago

Ownership

I've noticed that the more a company pushes on ownership the more difficult it is to actually execute it.

lorecore2• 2 months ago

Whenever someone at work tells you to take more ownership, the correct response is: "Sure, I'll take more RSUs". Of course, that's never what they mean. Ownership for me, responsibility for thee.

threecheese3• 2 months ago

It’s there, at the end, -ish:

Interpersonal excellence: individuals who are good humans, embrace diversity, inclusion and belonging, assume good intent and treat everyone with respect

perching_aix• 2 months ago

I thought GitLab was a bit more respectable than this LinkedIn style slop. I cringe less at horoscopes than this.

fyrn_• 2 months ago

Yeah, I had thought so as well. Lots of big Linux projects use them. Very brand damaging post in my opinion

tjpnz• 2 months ago

SQOMCO?

kunley• 2 months ago

It was just buzzwords from the beginning, so at least now it's less pretending to make any sense

blindriver2• 2 months ago

I don't understand why companies are abandoning DEI so quickly and so decisively. What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again, are they going to add them back into their core values as swiftly as they abandoned them?

At least companies like Coinbase made principled stances against forced DEI and employee activism earlier than everyone else. Doing it now seems weird because if it does become mandated again, they're going to look so phony.

scarmig• 2 months ago

It always was unprincipled: regardless of whether someone's a fan of DEI or not, these companies are short-sighted, profit-driven, and at best reactive to trends. The only reason any person thought otherwise is that they were either desperately looking for a victory or desperately looking for an enemy to be angry about.

slg3• 2 months ago

What happens if/when a Democrat president is elected that mandates DEI and ESG all over again

Mandates? There is this weird revisionist history that DEI was a Biden era invention that all these companies were forced to roll out in January 2021. These programs were simply the latest evolution of prolonged and steady cultural shifts. I remember attending events trying to promote diversity in the computer science department when I was in college 20+ years ago. Killing DEI isn't wiping out four years of progress, it's attempting to wipe out decades.

bdangubic• 2 months ago

Trump’s entire administration is all, 100% DEI hires, he is a DEI King (DEI by its pure definition is someone getting a job while many other people are more qualified for said job)

throw-the-towel2• 2 months ago

Why is this even a question? Of course they would, they're just companies, they go chase profits and cannot have real values, don't anthropomorphise your lawnmower, yada yada yada.

OhMeadhbh5• 2 months ago

I'm not even sure it even means "work harder, not smarder and wach yor seplling." In my experience it's more of a shibboleth to the new masters to let them know they're down with creating a top-down organization where information flows only one way.

Were I to have crafted this post, it would have included things like

"We ask our employees, customers and investors time to prove ourselves to you again as we re-commit to listening to our stake-holders and ensure our organization is properly re-positioned to execute our continued plans to deliver the best possible service..."

But instead it comes across as "someone read an article about Amazon's two-pizza team rule and we figured there were worse things to try."

xbmcuser• 2 months ago

Well under this administration even if you believe in DEI best not have it written anywhere

overfeed• 2 months ago

Costco[1] is doing just fine.

1. https://fortune.com/2026/02/13/costco-defies-trump-on-dei-bu...

shye• 2 months ago

It’s a game of chicken, and we know the president folds like a soggy tortilla (aka TACO). It’s just that some executives are even soggier.

wayeq2• 2 months ago

Long live "SQOMCO"

thayne3• 2 months ago

Tranparency is also missing from the new values. Can't say I'm terribly surprised,but I am disappointed.

swyx2• 2 months ago

is there a company that has kept DEI?

Mashimo• 2 months ago

Non American here, but as I understood it DEI is an older and very broad framework, which includes handicap accessibility and hiring military veterans. There are probably still plenty of companies that support that.

Lendal• 2 months ago

Yep. These companies forget that we can use AI too, to unpack these ridiculous corporate statements in record time to get right down to the point: We're going to dump all our values, and not even going to pay lip service to things like integrity, transparency, or diversity anymore.

7e• 2 months ago

I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.

IshKebab4• 2 months ago

Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade

It's Ruby, which is pretty horrific but still I think there was probably something not quite right in your setup because it isn't normally that slow.

bigbuppo4• 2 months ago

While there are a lot of little knobs that can tweak performance, it shouldn't be slow out of the box, yet it is the number one complaint about GitLab.

zmmmmm3• 2 months ago

yeah we run it on a tiny setup compared to that and it's fine. In fact, impressively snappy if anything.

fidotron• 2 months ago

The fact they can't capitalize on the current trainwreck of GitHub speaks volumes. If they had the right product people would be throwing money at them.

u_fucking_dork9• 2 months ago

Brother there’s nothing to capitalize on. They really don’t want an avalanche of free users bringing their shit down too I think.

PunchyHamster3• 2 months ago

companies using paid github are in same spot. Tho I'd imagine many already moved over

mh-• 2 months ago

Yeah, but they could make it up in volume.

KaiserPro4• 2 months ago

Gitlab used to be about as reliable as github. (ignoring the security oopses they used to have)

They simply don't have (or didnt) the skills to scale. THey were talking about using ceph to run things (which gives you an idea about how green their infra team was)

bmitch3020• 2 months ago

I'm not sure there's a lot to capitalize on, considering the state of hosting OSS development. But this really is a case study on watching your biggest competitor face plant into a wall, and responding by breaking into a head first sprint.

lbrito• 2 months ago

Layoff something something AI.

Yeah, sure. A couple of years ago it was Covid overhiring.

You know the one thing that is never ever going to be given as a reason for layoffs? The growing salary-productivity gap.

PunchyHamster3• 2 months ago

The reason is investors want more money

treis2• 2 months ago

At this point Gitlab investors haven't gotten any money.

shimman6• 2 months ago

GitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.

SimpleSalmon• 2 months ago

So much this. GitLab’s values and ethos were completely incompatible with becoming a public company. Sid is always seen as the good guy but it was his narrow minded greed that led here.

swyx2• 2 months ago

how exactly was it incompatible and why do you thikn you know better

setheron• 2 months ago

Could have been a B corp perhaps

elktown• 2 months ago

Aha, it's public. That explains the inflated employee count. Same story every time.

dmix2• 2 months ago

They have almost a billion dollars in revenue

shimman6• 2 months ago

And what good is that for the workers that still got laid off? Maybe software devs should have residuals.

everfrustrated3• 2 months ago

And somehow still never profitable! Living on borrowed time. Cuts were always coming. Nothing to do with AI.

frabcus• 2 months ago

I was finding this really interesting, that maybe a human had written it and it really reflected a vision for how we build software in this new world. I want to know the way, I'm curious!

Until I got to "One platform, three modes." and my brain just pattern matched "AI slop" and the entire post dissolved into meaningless for me.

I don't know if I can stop my mind reaching this conclusion. I'm sure someone at GitLab made some effort to carefully edit the post... But that it wasn't entirely rooted in a human who'd worked out how this stuff goes, but clearly had lots of AI writing it out... Just made my instinct go "this isn't worth paying attention to after all".

mhh__• 2 months ago

Can't imagine that slop is going to save them. Gitlab is a totally directionless, beyond self-hosting which I think is commendable, shoddily implemented product. I don't hate it, in that it is at least predictable, but the lack of basically any interesting view on how software should be developed or even look is such a waste.

damsta• 2 months ago

Where you should expect to see us evolve is in the quality, depth and pace of innovation we ship.

Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.

jaredcwhite2• 2 months ago

Indeed. I've only seen that "quality, depth and pace of innovation" is in inverse proportion to the adoption of slop machines within an org. The more sloppy they get, the more the output stinks to high heaven.

wiseowise7• 2 months ago

“Don’t make mistakes”

usernametaken29• 2 months ago

GitLab never ceases to amaze me in terms of just how bad their product roadmap is. Practical things like CI improvements are put off over UI rebranding on unicorn colours. Yet, good tooling is exactly why people used to pay for GitLab. For better or worse maybe this finally can change and we can get more customer oriented roadmaps again

rwmj• 2 months ago

The new UI is terrible, and the most important change they've done this year is ... drum roll ... renaming merge requests as "work items", because reasons.

Having said that, UI gripes aside, it works fine as a less complicated replacement for github.

ricardobayes4• 2 months ago

Until very recently, in my experience the data filtering on issues was broken (at least on the self-hosted version).

Also their diffing, they use "..." diffing, and ".." is not apparently there in their GUI. As a git diffing tool I found this very odd.

maxloh• 2 months ago

I actually like GitLab's new UI, but their frontend is far too laggy given its complexity, especially since most of their pages are actually server-side rendered. It doesn't help that they use a weird combination of Vue 2 and jQuery in their codebase.

I think that as a corporation promoting the use of AI, they should actually be AI users themselves. They should just rewrite that laggy UI in Svelte, Solid, or even vanilla JS. Any of those would work.

dzonga3• 2 months ago

web-components & vanillaJS will solve their slow UI.

lta• 2 months ago

I'm sorely disappointed by gitlab, I was hoping they would be a safe harbor against this whole AI bullshit typhoon.

bigbuppo4• 2 months ago

They went all-in on AI features rather than making it less slow.

nijave3• 2 months ago

Ironically that's the only AI feature they need, making it less slow

Havoc• 2 months ago

removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work.

I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.

It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.

bob0012• 2 months ago

Middle management is also why there’s so many broken processes and challenges in the first place.

vkou4• 2 months ago

Middle management exists to turn conflicting marching orders from the directors into less conflicting marching orders for the line workers, and to keep any negative feedback on how fucking stupid the directors are from ever reaching them.

They don't cause the broken processes. They are the symptom of a broken executive process. A fish rots from the head down, and the people at the top get exactly the kind of company that they ask for.

retinaros3• 2 months ago

Not really. Middle management is there to be in meetings all day long with nothing produced but identifying low performers.

lpribis• 2 months ago

Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.

Really? In my experience it's the rank-and-file employees who have this knowledge of how to get on with it without ceremony and politics. And the broken processes and politics are created BY the middle managers.

soared• 2 months ago

Agreed - 75% of the front line managers I’ve had are pure managers without any domain/company/industry knowledge

notTooFarGone• 2 months ago

Middle managment is also where most of your negative feedback is lost. I think moving fast in general needs tighter feedback loops and this is simply not possible in large organizations.

taurath• 2 months ago

Do you really think that upper management wants feedback that the stupid fucking ideas they have are boneheaded? The point of middle management is to absorb it so it doesn't reach the children at the top and make them feel bad

maxgashkov• 2 months ago

Negative feedback is not lost, it's filtered. No one at the top is equipped to deal with the actual feedback from ICs, unless your org is 10 people in a bike shed.

u_fucking_dork9• 2 months ago

GitHub was famously flat and far more successful than them.

PunchyHamster3• 2 months ago

Not with 8 layers of it. Institutional knowledge lies between managers and engineers and maybe one layer above that, not further

33MHz-i486• 2 months ago

middle management is hired to delegate but persists mostly grow itself and its influence

crote11• 2 months ago

This feels like a massive own goal.

GitHub is publicly destroying itself in a desperate attempt to realize Microsoft's AI dreams, and as its main competitor your response is... to do the same?

Rather than going for a "Humans first, robot assistants welcome" approach which promises to deliver things like stability, reliability, trustworthiness, and human connections, they decide to go all-out on firing the humans and letting bots handle things like code review while explicitly shifting the existing human-first company values towards making the remaining humans responsible for the bot's mistakes.

They could've chosen to market themselves as the sane save haven for the GitHub exodus. Instead they choose to go down in history like Google abolishing "Don't be evil". But hey, I bet chanting "AI! AI! AI!" (albeit quite late to the game) will deliver a very solid lukewarm increase in shareholder value!

cryzinger• 2 months ago

I'm no big-city product strategist, but this is what kills me about so many of these "we're pivoting to AI" announcements. Everyone else is doing the same thing (or already had a long time ago--like you said, GitLab is late to the game here), so squeezing yourself into an AI-shaped mold does exactly nothing to differentiate yourself from the competition. And if/when the AI hype machine sputters to a halt, the few companies that didn't do this will suddenly find themselves at an advantage, because they'll have real, actual differentiators to brag about.

Like, I know there are actual reasons and incentives here for the ever-present AI pivot. But I think they're stupid and short-sighted incentives.

anonymars2• 2 months ago

Reminds me of when struggling Firefox (then single-process) decided to basically redo their UI to copy Chrome:

"So...you decided to throw away what distinguished you from your faster, more stable competitor?"

semiquaver6• 2 months ago

They’re even repeating the debunked excuses GitHub has been making for their own failure!

dvduval• 2 months ago

I recently switched everything from bitbucket to GitHub mostly just because GitHub is more integrated with the AI tools I use. I feel like they’re probably still pretty big in Europe, but they’re losing in some markets more than before.

Steeeve• 2 months ago

Wow gitlab. Right when everyone was looking to see if you could lead with all the fails at github, you basically said "We're going to throw our source at ChatGPT and see what happens"

herpdyderp• 2 months ago

Right? I was seriously considering migrating everything in our company from GitHub to GitLab. Now I'm seriously considering self hosting our git instead.

walrus014• 2 months ago

I don't know if that really solves your problem if the main trunk of development for gitlab is being run through several AI slop machines before they push it to what they call stable, then you download that (or use a debian, redhat package for gitlab which originated from it) and self host on your own machine the results of the AI slop fest.

hkpack• 2 months ago

Self-host your git, take this as a sign.

Forgejo is great.

phillipcarter2• 2 months ago

Using Tangled for my stuff now, it's alpha, but it's a bit fun to host your own Knot and Spindle servers but still connect to a full social graph.

abalashov4• 2 months ago

You'd be surprised how far you can get with self-hosted Gitea.

youre-wrong3• 2 months ago

I find these takes funny. One day you will leave or get let go and someone will be like “finally we can move to a proper system”

Ekaros• 2 months ago

I just look at the pricing and really start thinking about is it really multi hundred euro a year per seat product... Frankly as consumer those pricing levels just seems like distanced from reality.

daemin2• 2 months ago

I don't think hosting git is all that complicated, just install it on a server, create a repo, and push to it.

What is complicated is having a convenient interface for managing the repository (users, groups, and hook-actions) and showing what the repository contains (commits, branches, tags).

I remember back in the day the first part was handled adequately with software like gitosis and gitolite, which just used git repository to manage other git repositories on the system.

deng• 2 months ago

Oh well, they really do their best to alienate people as well. They just completely overhauled their UX, and after that update, people at my company were so confused, they couldn't even open new issues anymore, because everything was somehow renamed to "work items". I kid you not, literally two decades of UX people were used to, just thrown out the window, it's absolutely mind-boggling. The feedback to this is devastating:

https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/590689

rvz• 2 months ago

GitLab has achieved "AGI" internally.

bigbuppo4• 2 months ago

Does AGI mean Abhorrent Git Interface?

jnwatson• 2 months ago

It just struck me. I always thought I had writing software to fall back on, in case my main gig doesn't work out. I don't think it will still be there when I'm ready to return.

globular-toast• 2 months ago

If "writing software" means you took a bootcamp and can churn out some HTML/CSS/JS using a popular framework, then yeah, it won't be too valuable in future. However, if you mean you are able to deliver software to solve real problems in a variety of languages and platforms then I think you'll be ok.

monkaiju• 2 months ago

Just today we started a new cycle at work to move from GitHub to Forgejo, its such a refreshing tool... So fast, supports everything we need (and more), and no AI slop. Very happy with our decision

whimblepop4• 2 months ago

GitLab's old values are for now still listed in their handbook:

GitLab’s six core values are Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent. We react to them with values emoji and they are made actionable below.

Since those terms don't speak for themselves individually, it's worth seeing what they're supposed to mean to get a sense of what GitLab is forsaking now. Each section is actually pretty lengthy, so you should go look and skim for yourself.

Here's the page: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/

And here's an archive from yesterday, for when that changes: https://web.archive.org/web/20260510150031/https://handbook....

LambdaComplex• 2 months ago

here's an archive from yesterday, for when that changes

GitLab's "internal" workings are surprisingly public, so you can just look at the git history yourself: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/blob/ma...

retinaros3• 2 months ago

« See how agentic AI transforms software delivery »

MeetingsBrowser2• 2 months ago

Someone should gather all the creatively worded layoff announcements and put them into a museum.

Aside, none of these announcements even attempt to make sense.

GitLab's TAM is exploding, demand is through the roof, LLM tooling is making each IC more productive, and to capatalize on this moment GitLab is

... "transparently restructuring" by asking employees to quit so they don't have to lay off as many...

trhway3• 2 months ago

Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands. Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.

almost like a copy of my post :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982975

We've seen these tech waves several times - C and COBOL instead os ASM, CAD/4GL, template generation, Visual Basic and the likes (good old Delphi), Java (which allowed to a lot of mid-inept people to write compilable non-immediately-crashing programs), spread of python, and now AI. Every time we have an expansion of the industry, and every time glorious promises which get delivered on modestly. The point here is that they get delivered on.

And with AI i suppose it will be similar, though much better than before. In those previous waves human brain was the limit. This time we throw that limit away from the start - nobody will be able to comprehend the sheer amount of AI-generated code. Yes, that approach will hit some limit down the road of course too...

crote11• 2 months ago

The point here is that they get delivered on.

... so where's the delivery?

I have no doubt that AI is making some programmers quite a bit more productive. But if it is even 10% as good as all the marketing claims, we should be seeing an explosion of new tech startups, and a huge increase in feature shipping rate and number of bugs closed. Why isn't this obviously happening? Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion?

What I am seeing instead is million-line AI slop pet projects whose sole "user" is its developer, and large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products. If there's no genuine user value being delivered, who's going to pay for those thousand-dollar-per-month developer tools?

trhway3• 2 months ago

Where's the next Dotcom Boom or Cloud SaaS Explosion?

i see it isn't your first rodeo :) So, in Dotcom the companies needed huge financing for hardware and those money were the main limiter, in Cloud SaaS era small teams with relatively small financing mostly for salaries were able to deliver large - AirBnb, Uber, WhasApp, ... - and the employees, their brain abilities and their ability to work together were the main limiter. Now with AI we don't have these limiters. I'd say the slopped up Claude Code and OpenClaw are the examples of the new wave which is just starting.

large companies falling over each other to enshittify their products.

Oh, yes, each wave the software is even more sh.tty than before, and this time i think we're really in for a shock to our imagination of how sh.tty it can get. All these datacenters here and later in space would need some slop to churn through :)

My bet is that we'd not have a software as a static set of bits existing for more than one execution. I think we'll have Just-In-Time software. An ephemeral one. It will be generated on the fly for specific task and discarded after. That will keep those datacenters busy at least for some time.

Another storyline i, with some horror, expect is merging of the coming boom of actual physical robots with the boom of AI-slopped software - that should be fascinating :)

looneysquash• 2 months ago

It's not clear to me from that post how they will be spending the money they'll save by firing 60% of our R&D team.

Could someone explain it?

If you have a lot of new stuff to build, and if you're not currently losing money, why start a new initiative with a layoff?

semiquaver6• 2 months ago

Tokens, I’d wager.

Miner49er3• 2 months ago

Yeah doesn't make sense.

My guess is they are doing this to prep for an acquisition. Probably by an AI company or Datadog or similar.

nunez3• 2 months ago

That's exactly what's happening here.

rirze2• 2 months ago

While hosting internal services for 4 years, Gitlab was the only service that ran hybrid. Wish they could get their act together and focus on actual engineering again.

If anyone at Gitlab management is reading this; getting your microservices to run fully stateless in a Kubernetes cluster should the #1 goal. No disclaimers about potential risk. It's been 5+ years. Get it together. Stop bolting on minor package management features no one is going to end up using anyways.

tapoxi• 2 months ago

They actually fixed the Gitaly thing a month or two ago

rirze2• 2 months ago

Thank god. I left that job 9 months ago so that's good to hear.

Sucks that it's `(Beta)`, but progress I guess.

Edit: Nvm, I found the asterisk; Full HA requires Gitlab to make Praefect Kubernetes-native and that is not done yet. [1]

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitaly-on-kubernetes-generally...

ahmadtbk• 2 months ago

Isn't there like 100 ways to host git repos now?

retinaros3• 2 months ago

Is there a polymatket for when its gonna be layoff due to hantavirus overhiring?

torben-friis2• 2 months ago

Lots of interesting information here:

The agentic era affords GitLab the largest opportunity in our history as a company, and we're making the structural and strategic decisions to meet it
Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one

To meet their largest opportunity ever, they believe they need less resources. I'm not sure I understand how that follows.

We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up

Is this also in the list of "we create code twice as fast and the bottleneck is review so YOLO no bottleneck?". I've yet to see a convincing justification for this. If anything, if you're going full throttle all the more reason to watch the steering wheel, no?

That said, 8 layers of management is a lot of management, and every line of the message seems like leadership truly believes they are sinking in bureaucracy. Let's see how unneeded those 3 layers they're cutting were.

pargon2• 2 months ago

8 layers of management is a lot of management

Seems like a fair assessment. Maybe they should start by getting rid of the people who put that structure in place?

this_user• 2 months ago

Didn't they do that? Staples only came in as CEO at the end of 2024, and I assume he has been working on a plan to restructure the company since then. Because their financials are not great, and they have been losing money every year since 2019.

groby_b2• 2 months ago

8 layers of management???

At gitlabs team size, that means every manager has 2-3 reports? Yeah, I'd be cutting layers too.

malaproping4• 2 months ago

They have 2800 employees with 5-10 reports per manager.

michaelt• 2 months ago

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/company/structure/

GitLab has at most eight layers in the company structure (Associate/Intermediate/Senior, Manager/Staff, Senior Manager/Principal, Director/Distinguished, Senior Director, VP/Fellow, Executives, Board).
[...] You can skip layers but you generally never have someone reporting to the same layer (Example of a VP reporting to a VP).

So they're counting the board of directors as a layer above the CEO.

I'm speculating, but they probably also have an unbalanced tree - you'll often see the IT security chief reporting directly to the CEO (because it's important to keep on top of, and they need authority to do their job) but only having 50 people below them in the org chart.

In some corporations you also sometimes get almost-nonexistent ranks created to smooth over a reorganisation. If a level 5 bureaucrat decides to merge the departments of two of their level 4 bureaucrats, they could demote one of them. Or they could make one into a level 4.5 bureaucrat.

ricardobayes4• 2 months ago

Gitlab has approx. 2300 employees (!)

I never really got why they need to be a public company in the first place.

andrewstuart2• 2 months ago

I'm on board with your gut that this feels more YOLO than careful but to be fair, in the engineering world fly by wire is very much precedented. I'm specifically thinking of the B2 bomber where it's essentially unflyable without a computer between the inputs and the outputs. Partially just keeping the plane from turning into a frisbee by reacting faster than a human possibly could, but also treating the controls inputs as the intent and manipulating the control surfaces programmatically in order to make that work. It's not quite the same thing of course but I think there's some carryover.

Still. Not a huge fan of this announcement or the general ways the landscape is evolving these days.

conciliatory• 2 months ago

This is a great analogy to what this time in IT and tech feels like. We are moving up a layer in terms of abstraction, and for those of us who cut our teeth in processes where we had lower level understanding it feels very destabilizing. I've been telling my team for a few years now that becoming an "agent manager" is the path forward - it's more true now with the latest revelation that "managers are out of style", and every role will have some IC component. I've seen it in my work - I can express intent more clearly to Claude and get immediate feedback for any technical tasks, so my team needs to be able to create intent at a higher level and translate that to their agent team, rather than getting directive task alignment. We've been through these pendulum swings before - this should start to stabilize in a few years... That's the industry vet perspective - I'd be lying if I said it didn't feel different this time though...

treis2• 2 months ago

You know how many layers of management I have Bob?

blitzar• 2 months ago

15 pieces of flair is the minimum.

ForHackernews• 2 months ago

You have to translate from management speak: They see the largest opportunity ever to make more money, by spending less money on staff.

skywhopper• 2 months ago

“Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load .... Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services.”

Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?

kajman2• 2 months ago

I'd hate to be their customer right now. Is this the only "corporate-scale" forge besides Github?

There's a lot of cool things happening between Gitea/Forgejo, Tangled, and Radical, but I doubt the latter two have any significant usage beyond OSS hobby projects. I'm not sure if the former two do, either.

nijave3• 2 months ago

Atlassian Bitbucket

calvinmorrison• 2 months ago

what value does gitlab provide that some glue scripts dont i am sorry

zmmmmm3• 2 months ago

Rather striking statements that have me somewhat concerned:

Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We're doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces

Is there any broader consensus or information on this? Git doesn't scale? is being rebuilt for agents?! Monoliths are out and services are back? Humans are second class citizens now (human shaped interfaces - bad!!)?

What the hell are they planning to do in there at Gitlab?!

rdedev4• 2 months ago

Won't this be bad for agents since now you need to provide this new API in their prompt, as opposed to just regular git which the model has seen enough in its training data

zmmmmm3• 2 months ago

history suggests so .... people do keep trying to make agent native tools and workflows, but time and time again it turns out to be better just to expose raw inputs and tools to them and let them work with those. See skills beating MCP in most cases where their purpose overlaps for example - it's more effective just to let an agent write git commands than give it a "git tool" with a structured interface. People don't seem to grok the intuition of how heavily biased training on trillions of token of human language and existing software code makes the models towards working well with raw input.

aiscoming• 2 months ago

steve yegee was saying this in december, that he had multiple people at companies with heavy AI usage telling him that git cant handle 1000+ commits per hour that these companies are producing now, that the agent can't push because between the push command initiation and its finish another push happened

throwaway277432• 2 months ago

Better pay.
Once approved, our new bonus program will give every team member who isn’t on an incentive compensation plan or bonus plan today, the opportunity to earn a cash bonus based on their individual performance, targeting 10% of salary, awarded at their manager’s discretion.

LOL. So basically buckle up and do what you're told and grind. And hope your manager likes you or you'll get nothing.

tonnydourado• 2 months ago

We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up, and plan to right-size roles across the company to follow suit.

Ah, yes, finally gitlab will have the same uptime leves as GitHub.

hn_acc1• 2 months ago

When everyone is leaping head-over-heels into AI / agents, you need SOME part of your stack that is NOT that - slow, tested changes you can (mostly) trust, not "break everything quickly - again" stuff.

Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..

lifeisstillgood• 2 months ago

I genuinely don’t know what “ Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale “‘means not what “rebuilding the CI/CD as orchestration layer” means.

I think you need to explain it like it’s a bash script else I don’t think you understand it.

(Ironically I don’t think if this article was the prompt, I don’t think an agent would code it up the way you are thinking)

iLoveOncall• 2 months ago

It's truly amazing that GitLab has 2,500 employees to begin with when I haven't ever encountered a single company or project using their services, besides one or two obscure open-source project once every few years.

dewey3• 2 months ago

It’s enterprise software that’s used in big corporates. I don’t know why you’d expect to see it in the wild as regularly as hobbyist projects on GitHub.

digitaltrees2• 2 months ago

Having used AI to write code, and seen the bs it outputs half the time, any org speed running to a parallel autonomous unreviewed code base is going to get hit with a massive rude awakening when their cluster f of a codebase melts down.

simonw6• 2 months ago

planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams

One of the really interesting things about GitLab was that not only did they have employees in a large number of countries but they also published their employee handbook which helped show quite how much work it was to support that:

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment... lists 18 countries right now. I guess they're losing 5 of those.

Here's a permalink to the current version of that page https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/... since it mentions that "Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging is one of our core values" and so is likely to be updated pretty soon!

They even used to have a public payroll.md page detailing how payroll worked in multiple countries - they moved that into their private docs a few years ago but the last public version is here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/...

UPDATE: I got the countries piece wrong. The linked OP says:

Reduced operational footprint: We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience. We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer. Team members who are in good standing and would like to relocate are welcome to do so. We'll continue to serve customers in those markets through our partner network where appropriate.

I said they operated in 18 countries, so clearly my impression was out-dated and incorrect.

Also "We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer" suggests to me that it's a 30% cut to countries with "only a handful of people", not a 30% cut to countries overall.

haute_cuisine3• 2 months ago

We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience

Are they going to rectify this by laying these people off?

odie5533• 2 months ago

I have no doubt that with the properly applied power of AI, Gitlab too can make their product worse.

simonw6• 2 months ago

This is quite an aggressively optimistic vision for the future of the software industry to tuck into a "workforce reduction" announcement:

The agentic era multiplies demand for software. Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands. Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.

Also notable that the workforce reduction they describe doesn't appear to target engineers - they're "nearly doubling the number of independent teams" in R&D and "removing up to three layers of management in some functions".

morkalork• 2 months ago

The average value an individual software is lower but the volume is definitely higher, if github imploding regularly is any indication

rdedev4• 2 months ago

hundreds/user/month

What is this based on? The only thing I can think of is AI coding tools but only a few companies do it properly. I don't see gitlab capturing any of that spending

Also the whole "removing layers". Today's prof g market video was about the topic. Afaik it was the Coinbase CEO telling the same. Do these people get together to discuss their talking points? Or are they signalling to investors?

simonw6• 2 months ago

Presumably based on the fact that the OpenAI/Anthropic $200/month plans are selling like hot-cakes, and it's not often that a new software category comes around which attracts those kinds of per-seat prices.

vkou4• 2 months ago

Do these people get together to discuss their talking points?

None of these visionaries and thought leaders have ever had an original idea in their lives, they just ape eachother.

punkbit• 2 months ago

Makes sense! I’ve worked with teams where the main bottleneck wasn’t technical complexity or even the company itself; it was a people problem.

Things like long discussions over formatting that should just be enforced by linters, pushing non-idiomatic patterns despite official docs and tooling recommending otherwise, or turning simple problems into meetings scheduled “for next week”, "in two weeks", "let's have a meeting and invite everyone" instead of just fixing the issue and opening a PR. Which sometimes takes 10 minutes!

At some point it starts to feel like responsiveness and initiative are treated as threats rather than strengths. Autonomy and ownership matter a lot more than people realize. Wonder how that'll look like!

simonw6• 2 months ago

This title is editorialized - the original title is "GitLab Act 2" and both the workforce reduction and CREDIT values pieces are hidden in among the details.

gnomespaceship3• 2 months ago

In this case, you could say the original title is also misleading, or at least it doesn't say what it's really about, so imho the edit was justified

hemul3n• 2 months ago

Our transparent restructure process creates uncertainty that is real and it's hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I ask that you reflect on the why, what and how and engage your manager in a real conversation about the work, the questions and concerns you have, and what the next chapter looks like for you. Your manager may not have all the answers, because they too are going through this period of uncertainty. The conversation still matters and your input shapes how we land as a team.

Setting aside the whole "I'm not going to pretend otherwise which reads suspiciously like Claude, I don't understand how this is supposed to make employees feel any better. No one knows what's going on and through talking we'll figure it out? Mmmmmmhmmmmmm.

makeitdouble3• 2 months ago

"talk to your manager" is code for "don't straight go rant on SNS over this"

For some people it might actually be worth it, not to solve anything but to talk to someone. It still sucks anyway.

jzb• 2 months ago

Lord. I pity the managers that are going to be worrying about their jobs sitting in 1:1s with people who are also looking for answers when there really aren’t any to give.

cdrnsf• 2 months ago

We're going to turn our infrastructure in to code slop in the hope that we can scale to host all of your code slop in the same way that GitHub's code slop has failed to host code slop.

simonw6• 2 months ago

https://www.google.com/search?q=gitlab+stock shows their stock price was ~$52 a year ago and is $26 today, so down 50% in 12 months. It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy.

If investor fears are that AI makes GitLab's business less valuable, including this in their "GitLab Act 2" announcement makes a whole lot of sense:

The agentic era multiplies demand for software. Software has been the force multiplier behind nearly every business transformation of the last two decades. The constraint was the cost and time of producing and managing it. That constraint is collapsing. As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand. Last year, the developer platform market used to be measured in tens of dollars per user per month, this year it is hundreds/user/month and headed to thousands. Not only is the value of software for builders increasing, but we believe there will be more software and builders than ever, and we will serve an increasing volume of both.

Wrote a bit more about this on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/

Yoric• 2 months ago

It's quite possible this is because they weren't making enough noise about their AI strategy.

That's how I interpret the move, too.

dandellion• 2 months ago

Looking at their stock it has always been going down, even before AI. How could we know that the reason it's going down now is they were not making enough noise about AI, and not whatever it was that was making it go down before?

simonw6• 2 months ago

We can't. It's rarely possible to confidently say why a stock moves. Hence "quite possible" in my comment.

throwawaypath2• 2 months ago

Down almost 15% now. Investors hate the CEO's buzzword bingo slop.

polynomial• 2 months ago

Calling it "Act 2" certainly isn't helping with investors.

gritspants• 2 months ago

There's no reason to tie every software companies rise and fall to AI. Several years ago they changed their enterprise licensing costs. It was such an aggressive and needless cash grab (1k/dev). The writing has been on the wall for a long time.

apple4ever• 2 months ago

This seems like the more likely reason. People wanted to give them money, but they didn't want to take it unless it was in a giant pile.

popcorncowboy• 2 months ago

As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand.

This is a non sequitur. Jervons paradox doesn't apply here. No-one is sitting around going "you know what I need? More software". The supply side is exploding. Demand? I dunno man.

runeks• 2 months ago

No-one is sitting around going "you know what I need? More software"

I disagree. Every company goes "I need more software — iff its TCO is less than the savings it produces". So if the cost of producing a piece of software, which can save a company $1m per month, now costs $500k per month to develop instead of $5m per month, then demand for that piece of software will absolute go from zero to greater-than-zero.

mlhpdx• 2 months ago

The supply side is exploding. Demand? I dunno man.

Isn’t that the nature of the paradox; that we can’t predict where the demand comes from and yet it does?

HumblyTossed• 2 months ago

All these corporations either showing their true colors because the current admin, or they're scared to death of the current admin. Either way, it's fuck employees!

saadatq• 2 months ago

“ AI is the substrate on which future software gets built”

- when you see the word substrate in corporate speak, you know where that’s from…

rdedev4• 2 months ago

Relevant video: https://youtu.be/WAUnmQt2Z7Y?si=Gll0AkqyAdsSjqlA

My manager has started speaking like this. He showed a slide recently which had the words AI and Quantum nearby

robinhood• 2 months ago

Of course this is happening. Gitlab's values were only there for marketing - just take a look at their massive turnover of employees who get burn so fast they don't have time to update the About page fast enough.

Gitlab is a terrible company, period.

gnomespaceship3• 2 months ago

You're wrong about the values. Since the start, GitLab's values were real and lived, unlike every other company I've been at. Only after Staples' takeover as CEO and C-suite changes, they started eroding rapidly, starting with Transparency.

Source: I'm ex-GitLab

robotmay• 2 months ago

Yeah it was a pretty awesome place to work up until the IPO, my first year was probably the most enjoyable I've ever had at a job.

OhMeadhbh5• 2 months ago

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale.

I've done some organizational consulting in the past, often trying to help companies understand why their employees don't trust management. I suspect the powers that be thought that post was decent, and I think the GitHub survivors will likely ignore most of it. And I don't know anything about what's going on there. But if you told me GitHub employees were made MORE nervous by that post than LESS, I would not be surprised.

CGamesPlay• 2 months ago

How do you think the GitLab employees felt about it?

OhMeadhbh5• 2 months ago

I obviously picked the wrong week to stop sniffing glue.

sgarland4• 2 months ago

…this is GitLab, not GitHub.

OhMeadhbh5• 2 months ago

You say tomato, I say tomahto. Yes, my mistake. I shouldn't post things before my mid-afternoon coffee.

smhaziq• 2 months ago

I think you might have GitHub and GitLab mixed up.

OhMeadhbh5• 2 months ago

Indeed I have. I didn't intend it to be, but it is accidentally a data point on the distinctiveness of brand names in this sector.

threecheese3• 2 months ago

Am I alone in being extremely sensitive to LLM-style writing, observing it in this article, and feeling a little upset about that? The letter to employees ticks several of the boxes, and if I’m not wrong that’s kinda shitty. Or perfectly aligned with the spirit of the announcement (or both).

sgarland4• 2 months ago

Great engineers are problem solvers and builders who care about system design, distributed systems, reasoning through failures, safely integrating new capability into critical systems, and making decisions under ambiguity.

Yes, and the people who are all-in on agentic AI are, in practically every example I’ve seen, not that. They’re the jackasses giving Claude root access to their prod DB and then writing a blog post about how much they’ve learned from their mistake.

dunder_cat• 2 months ago

After CVE-2023-7028 (account takeover via password reset, IIRC you just had to add a semi-colon between the correct email and the attacker email and it'd email both) was exploited against my cluster, the boasting about fully-automated changes and reviews scares me. I hope I'm far from the only one that hasn't forgotten issues like this.

I'm aware that the defective code was not written by AI but nonetheless, GitLab is what stands between many small organizations and their most precious resources. I was fortunate that 2FA stopped the damage, but what's going to happen the next time? What if my organization is permanently damaged because we taught the machines to go fast and break things, too [1]?

[1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier.

Imustaskforhelp3• 2 months ago

[1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier.

I would love to help a non-profit and so, I am curious but what are your thoughts on authentik/authelia and others, can they might help in any use case to what you are suggesting, I would love to have a more in-depth discussion!

Also thanks for working at non-profit, although I am not entirely sure what is about but thanks to your non profits and all the other hard working people working at non profits for a better world once again!

jmull• 2 months ago

Sounds panicky to me... changing everything all at once for all the reasons.

I guess someone will be selling enterprises something that lets them say, "We're doing AI too!" Might as well be gitlab?

davexunit• 2 months ago

Sure am glad I moved everything off of Gitlab awhile ago. Trainwreck of a company.

tsh3lley• 2 months ago

If you were impacted, Magnetic (AI Tax Prep for CPA firms) is hiring senior - staff level engineers in SF https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic

Email me subject “gitlab” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)

arcza• 2 months ago

Imagine how refreshing if the press release simply said:

"We over-hired, we're ram-packed full of managers pinging each other on Slack all day and need to cut costs to sustain our operation. We think GitHub's shit and we want to be a nimble org with a fighting chance at eating their lunch. We're also gonna provide 1000 free runner hours/mo to open source projects that move from GitHub to gitlab, and we're gonna make project namespaces on gitlab.com a first class thing like GitHub did"

bitsytomato• 2 months ago

GitLab workers could do the funniest thing and all take the voluntary package.

henry2023• 2 months ago

I'm happy I'm no longer a shareholder of this company.

Software stocks won't win longterm if their value proposition is "we vibe code now".

dewey3• 2 months ago

There’s still a big difference between “vibe coding” which is what it was called 2 years ago when people tried to “one shot” whole products and AI assisted / agentic development in more structured ways like it’s happening right now in many companies. In capable hands it’s a great tool.

0xbadcafebee• 2 months ago

I'm glad this website is still alive: https://layoffs.fyi/

TeeWEE• 2 months ago

Git itself wasn't designed for that load, and bolting AI onto platforms not built for agents is the biggest mistake of this era. We're doing a generational rebuild of the underlying infrastructure to handle agent-rate work as the default. Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services

Two big red flags here.

First git itself is distributed and built for scale.

I guesss they mean “gitlab” instead of “git”. But such a huge mistake would never go unnoticed.

Are they going to rebuilt git??

Secondly: a big rebuilt of monolith to services. Firstly there is nothing wrong with a Modulith. Secondly “rebuilt” will cause a lot of busy work without immediate value for customers.

And first of all: this announcement is done due to the stock price not AI The productivity increase with AI is inflated because they want their stock price up.

Sell Gitlab stock while you can. The leadership team has no clue what they are doing.

Sadly non engineering leaders buy into this dogma. AI is very usefull but in my experience doesn’t 10x if you don’t YOLO it.

Imustaskforhelp3• 2 months ago

Sadly non engineering leaders buy into this dogma. AI is very usefull but in my experience doesn’t 10x if you don’t YOLO it.

It makes you have 10x more the errors if you YOLO it ;) especially at a scale even remotely comparable to gitlab :/

Doesn't really inspire the greatest of confidences when they are literally dropping the ball on one of the greatest opportunities as github is being ensloppified.

Sometimes I wonder if I am more passionate towards my 7$/yr vps's and websites running on it than 7 billion $ companies (GitLab has a market cap or net worth of $4.36 billion. The enterprise value is $3.10 billion.[0] to be exact)

break things and move fast should work when you have 1000 users on your website, not 1000 full on entreprises (probably more for gitlab)

I guesss they mean “gitlab” instead of “git”. But such a huge mistake would never go unnoticed.
Are they going to rebuilt git??

These comments make me realize again how you all (who were alive ie) must have felt during the pets.com and dotcom mania. Some of these sentences are almost onion-video like titles. Its so all weird at a certain point. I am unsure how to feel about this.

[0] https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/gtlb/statistics/

yalok• 2 months ago

First git itself is distributed and built for scale.

there're different dimensions for "scale" - like handling large monorepos, orders of magnitude more commits, tighter requirements for latencies (for agentic use, e.g. for agentic history navigation)...

dvtkrlbs• 2 months ago

I mean Git had a lot of improvements for large monorepos.

lbotos2• 2 months ago

Git is not designed to handle 1000s of clones and merges to a single repo in minute scale even.

Sure, you are right. Git allows you to keep distributed state and eventually reconcile that.

Customers are trying to do that at absurd human scales right now without AI. Git itself is a bottleneck for large enterprises with large repositories and large CI configurations.

It may be hard to believe but it’s true.

nijave3• 2 months ago

Oh the irony. It was just last week I was lamenting Gitlab's lack of AI support. Best I could tell, Gitlab's solution to AI hitting servers is "block it with Anubis"

Melatonic2• 2 months ago

Surprised at the negativity here - did most of you read the source ?

They seem to be mostly reducing headcount of managers and claim (supposedly) to be prioritising engineering.

On top of that their redesign sounds interesting - they want to adapt the platform itself (and concept) to deal specifically with how AI "users" will code and submit changes (and the rate of and interaction of that model) vs humans. We'll see how this plays out but this doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all (assuming humans of course still get priority).

wayeq2• 2 months ago

Operationally, we grew into a shape that was right for the last era and isn't right for this one.

"We did nothing wrong, but ended up in the wrong shape!"

momo26• 2 months ago

Not making sense to me at all. The AI era should be a great opportunity for Github to show their reliability and developer-first law, but they decided to all in AI. As a developer, what I need is a well-working repository, not a agent that write, review, even publish the code for me.

mvdtnz• 2 months ago

This has nothing to do with GitHub.

iandanforth• 2 months ago

I don't understand how people can use the phrase "right-size" without a crushing sense of embarrassment and shame. Did you swallow a business consultant from 1990? That and phrases like "go forward strategy" say either 1. I do not know how to communicate like a human or 2. I am afraid of speaking naturally because it impinges on my self image as a business leader or 3. I do not want to accurately describe what I'm doing because that might expose my fragile ego to the possibility that I'm doing something which hurts people.

"We're firing a bunch of people because we think we don't need them anymore due to AI and we'll make more money without them."

There are times when businesses must fire people to stay afloat and it's a business that objectively needs to exist. This isn't one of them, so don't waste everyone's time with your BS, please.

AdmiralAsshat• 2 months ago

A letter to our customers and our investors.

You can always tell when the title is incredibly vague or bereft of details (e.g. "An update about our product") that it's going to be some flavor of either lay-offs, shutting down, or other enshittification.

whirlingzebra• 2 months ago

Now I know why my recent application didn't end up going anywhere

ern• 2 months ago

Engineering has always been about more than writing code.

That's true, but it's interesting how FizzBuzz as said to be the bete noir of the average dimwitted software developer, and how much cutting-edge engineering organizations used to emphasize code in their recruitment processes.

If writing code is being replaced by "engineering judgement" it's going to need a much smaller cohort of developers. Too many opinions spoil the broth, after all.

jaredcwhite2• 2 months ago

The future of forges is decentralized, and I'm getting all I need now out of Forgejo/Codeberg/Codefloe. I'll be handcoding software merrily away on platforms which don't suck and aren't beholden to techbros spewing buzzwords.

shmerl• 2 months ago

We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs

What can go wrong.

woah• 2 months ago

This is like when Bob Dylan went electric

npodbielski• 2 months ago

I was thinking of switching to Forgejo because gitlab as great it was to this point is enormous. Small service to have git, some web ui and pipelines that run build will be enough.

shevy-java• 2 months ago

In the last few weeks we increasingly see Microslop GitHub becoming worse.

Now GitLab announces it will have to fire people - the AI slop cuts away at finacnial gains here.

AI slop is killing everything.

outlore• 2 months ago

“Our company doesn’t make any money and burning tokens didn’t seem to help so we’re gonna lay some people off to make number go up”

mock-possum• 2 months ago

Meanwhile they can’t manage to get ‘keep both’ implemented in their interactive merge conflict tool. You have to edit it by hand.

aweb• 2 months ago

Is there a specific list of countries whee they'll be closing down?

gnomespaceship3• 2 months ago

Not yet, they'll share it on June 1

localhoster• 2 months ago

Another one bites the dust

sheepscreek• 2 months ago

If you put the typical knee jerk reaction aside, the article is a pretty good read on where things are headed. Particularly interesting is their gut feel around problems requiring deep technical knowledge multiplying and the talent that can solve them becoming the scarcest.

What we are witnessing so far has been just the tech world’s reaction. As typical companies catch on to the agentic era, we’re going to see more layoffs. A part of it may be due to “unlocked productivity” but more of it will be to make space in their ranks for hiring more AI native workforce. Which will also be scarce at the beginning.

I think we should get ready to see a very different kind of talent war, and at a scale and pace never seen before.

ivolimmen• 2 months ago

So basically they are saying: do not code here because we are letting machines code... nice.

gabrieledarrigo• 2 months ago

the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.

Reduce the work force of 30%. I don't know, dude, you didn't convince me.

vultour2• 2 months ago

GitLab could be the perfect case study on AI-powered efficiency improvements. I have never interacted with a piece of software that, for every single problem I found, there was an open issue always at least 4-7 years old that was just being shuffled around by managers adding and removing random labels.

Surely with all of these ridiculous developer productivity gains enabled by AI, they should finally be able to fix all of these ancient issues quickly and clean up the backlog.

Nope, “workforce reduction” thanks to AI again. This charade is getting boring.

denvrede• 2 months ago

I'm certain that if they would start doing that, without a proper strategy / workflow when it comes to QA, it will be GitHub reloaded. You'll be able to watch the decline in real-time.

close04• 2 months ago

I think what OP means is that these companies keep promising AI is exceptional for one thing but for some reason it's never used for that. The only visible outcome of AI in these companies is that they spend so much on it they end up laying off employees.

Has any of the companies who went all in on AI gotten better at their job because they went all in on AI?

stingraycharles• 2 months ago

But that’s the issue the parent is highlighting, you can’t just throw AI at these problems because the bottleneck is decision making, it always is, and AI is bad at that.

So nothing really changes in terms of product development velocity, it’s just headcount reduction.

But that’s not what their own marketing strategy communicates.

dude250711• 2 months ago

Even slop-maker-makers themselves struggle: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues

What hope slop-maker-users have then?

morningsam2• 2 months ago

To be fair, any LLM project gets a lot of stupid tickets, by virtue of a) marketing to users who aren't really developers and b) bad developers being more likely to use LLMs. Both of these groups are more likely to write bogus or non-reproducible bug tickets, as well as feature requests that don't make any sense. My guess is 10% of those 10,000 open issues are actual bugs or sensible requests.

On the other hand, LLMs seem perfect for triage and finding duplicates, so it's still surprising that they've let it get this bad.

siva74• 2 months ago

I have never interacted with a piece of software that, for every single problem I found, there was an open issue always at least 4-7 years old

You have never interacted with Jira?

vultour2• 2 months ago

I'm going to be honest with you, I never even considered that the pinnacle of enterprise software would have a public issue tracker (do they?). If something doesn't work the way I expect I just accept it and move on.

sesm• 2 months ago

The reason for this is: the only way to show productivity gains enabled by AI is to lay off people and pretend you are doing the same amount of work (while in reality you are severely dropping quality and accumulating technical debt).

DeusExMachina• 2 months ago

Also, when most work is unproductive, like managers shuffling around and relabeling issues, you can remove those managers without affecting output.

Cthulhu_2• 2 months ago

I think that in these cases, what they need more than more engineering or AI productivity, is good management. Close issues that get shuffled around too much as "yeah this is too vague", or "nah we can't fix this", or "you know what, fuck you I'm not doing it".

Productivity gains can also be achieved by reducing scope. The coming issues will be that because of increased productivity (idea -> working code) that software is too bloated, does too much, that product managers will and can say "yes" to everything. Until it becomes unmanageable.

And that's not a new problem, it's what basically every programming adage / wisdom going back 70 years is about.

e_i_pi_2• 2 months ago

I don't think this is literally true, but as an example an employee might not justify their wage in a single quarter but have a huge impact over time. In the short term firing them makes the company more profitable, but that's definitely not a good way to run a business. Everything is gambling now :/

funimpoded• 2 months ago

Dunno how it is these days, but that reads like Android roughly 2012-2020.

I once found a looooong bug report thread on their issue tracker 7ish years old that had all the usual waves of promises that a fix might make the next release, then silence, then repeat, and the usual challenges to the bug’s status every time a release happened, plus it saw community members correctly diagnose the problem in the first couple years, then by like year 5 there’s was a (small!) patch posted by a community member with multiple posters confirming it was good and fixed the issue, that the author and others had been begging Google to apply and get in a release for a couple years. There’d been no responses from Google folks for a while.

That might be the worst one I saw, but encountering something like that was a few-times-per-year thing in my android app dev years.

pjmlp• 2 months ago

I no longer care, thankfully, however for several years the Android NDK felt like it was a 20% project from someone on the team.

earthdeity• 2 months ago

On a similar note, Firefox doesn't support <input type="month">, which I was surprised to see (chrome landed it in 2012). I checked their issue tracker and... as you describe. Browsers are complex, of course, but they do stand out as a really glacial corner of the software world.

hombre_fatal2• 2 months ago

On the other hand, most issues rot due to process overhead, not because the ticket is hard.

For example, why are you working on a four-year-old issue, and a trivial one at that, when you're already behind schedule on the tasks assigned to you? Now someone else who has their own things to get done has to review it? And even trivial changes can be annoying to truly review beyond a blind LGTM.

Just one of the many ways that pressure builds against the utopia of burning through old tickets.

Aside, watch out for the double standard we have for AI on forums like this. AI is expected to be so good that it can magically overcome the forces that keep engineers from working on old tickets (which were never related to engineer productivity) and, when AI can't, well of course it couldn't because AI sucks.

duxup2• 2 months ago

And who knows the fix to some of these issues might be a hell of a lot more worked now that the bug has been baked in and the "real" fix is herculean now.

smeggysmeg2• 2 months ago

This is it, exactly. In any org, current management only cares about you working on their ideas. If they thought up the project, then they get the credit for it. Customer ideas, and old ones at that, don't get leaders credit.

Basically, every organization is constantly rotting due to the cliqueish behavior of leadership.

dzonga3• 2 months ago

maybe the 'microservices' approach + agentic coding (self directed agents) that have agency to pick up old tickets, open merge requests with maybe a human in the loop will fix all that.

that's the story being sold.

I don't buy it.

delfinom• 2 months ago

GitLab is American corporate bureaucracy out in the open for everyone to see.

It's why large American corporations acquire to innovate because they otherwise are too bloated with unqualified middle management to do anything.

porknbeans002• 2 months ago

Apparently you never worked with Atlassian.

They have active issue tickets that are highest priority and have been open for 20 years. That's not hyperbole. Actually 20 years.

ComplexSystems• 2 months ago

Yet another round of layoffs. Is there a fallback career? :-/

sschueller2• 2 months ago

Is this the best move for the customer or the investor?

nalekberov• 2 months ago

I will never trust nor respect businesses, who fires its people because “AI agents can plan, code, review, deploy, and repair”.

drdrek• 2 months ago

As someone that is raising money from VCs, I feel really sorry for large VC backed companies right now. What you see here is the Product-VC tension of the AI era, and in a large company its devastating.

Users want a product that delivers the value they are looking for, VCs are looking for infinite AI scale, these do not meet. So founders need to present two different values and visions, one for customers and one for VCs.

In a small early stage company you can pretty easily hide each side from the other so you can deliver value to your customers while dancing the VC dance, but as you get larger its harder.

I think founders will endure and VCs will calm down at some point, but there is going to be some suffering along the way.

Oh and have you heard that they built Cluade code with only 20 people? (ignore 12 years of AI research expertise head-start and that Anthropic now has thousands of developers)

twoodfin• 2 months ago

The message was pretty clear that the only “users” that matter to them now are agents.

It’s not clear at all this is the wrong move.

ricardobayes4• 2 months ago

Never really got how gitlab got so big, what's their USP? To my knowledge they don't really have anything that is not reproducible rather easily.

oblio3• 2 months ago

On premise Git forge with integrated issue tracker, CI/CD platform, and probably other 20 development adjacent tools. It has a ton of features so for sure it's not easily reproducible.

darkwater5• 2 months ago

The selling point would be vertical integration and that you don't need to stitch together 12 different SaaS CI products all attached to your source code, but just deal with one vendor (GitLab).

esafak7• 2 months ago

Make a better Github and I'll sign up. Gitlab doesn't quite qualify any more; it's more like a lateral move.

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

It should be turned into a semi-fictional tale, Catch-23, where intractable human unreasonableness creates comical absurdity.

rtdq• 2 months ago

We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up

Uh, if this is what I think it means, I wouldn't trust using a product where their company thinks that approvals for reviews can be automated.

lintfordpickle• 2 months ago

> "We've been working through some significant changes inside GitLab over the past few days"

I can't seem to get past this - all these decisions (and a work-force reduction :() are the result of a few days of pondering? I've had stomach aches that have lasted longer ..

bayindirh• 2 months ago

Software will be built by machines, directed by people. AI is the substrate on which future software gets built. Agents will plan, code, review, deploy, and repair.

"The Machine Stops" by Forster [0], anyone?

Honestly, I can't believe how repeatedly people ignore or don't know the warning signs put up by previous people.

Yes, it's science fiction, but so is 1984, Brave New World and Pump Six.

When will we go through something between 2001[1] and Tacoma[2]? Will we ever learn?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_Stops

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2001:_A_Space_Odyssey

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tacoma_(video_game)

spwa42• 2 months ago

What would you suggest as an alternative? Gitlab really sucks in my personal opinion, but what are your experiences with:

Gogs https://gogs.io/ (this IS gitea btw)

Forgejo https://forgejo.org/

Self hosted or cloud hosted. Also excluding Github because, please just fracking don't.

esafak7• 2 months ago

There is such a dire need for a viable Github and Gitlab competitor. Forgejo is the one I've one tried but it's lacking.

metric10• 2 months ago

Oh wow, $GLAB is down 31.68% YTD and they are announcing a massive restructuring and work force reduction. Is this th en---oh wait, AI!!!

qwshGA• 2 months ago

They are losing money and they are grasping at the AI straw.

All free software projects should leave GitLab immediately. Why should we support the IP thieves?

Miner49er3• 2 months ago

They promise to not use customer code to train models. AFAIK, that hasn't changed.

freedomben• 2 months ago

GiLab is one of the saddest stories in SaaS I can think of. They had an enormous opportunity years ago thanks to their relatively good product, open source nature, and free private repos (before github started offering that), but they squandered it by focusing heavily on "enterprise" and pricing themselves in a ridiculous way that made it non-sensical for startups and small companies. Their CI product alone was the best in the business for a while but they priced it such that it made no sense for most people. A real shame. It's sad to think of what could have been with better management.

dcchambers• 2 months ago

Their pricing has always been a challenge, but I think the biggest issue is that they went way too wide early on in an effort to capture the market. Their product pool was a mile wide but only an inch deep. People quickly realized many of the features they were promised were very rough around the edges or a limited POC. Their UX is pretty unintuitive as well, IMO.

The company is fascinating. The "everything is open" nature of how they build the business is an incredible value for people that want to see how the sausage is made...but it hasn't ultimately lead to a better product.

great_wubwub• 2 months ago

So is New Relic, which also featured the same CEO and CTO. I'm sure that's just a coincidence.

noisy_boy• 2 months ago

We’re re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams.

This seems to be the new emerging theme. I wonder if the idea is to let these smaller teams fight it out and those who survive, do so at the expense of others? If so, instead of meritocracy, usually politically savvy ones win. Or maybe the motivation is deliberate fragmentation allowing for easily picking and choosing for further reduction? Or maybe I'm just too cynical for my own good.

smeggysmeg2• 2 months ago

Employees maybe are too collaborative? And management thinks dividing and conquering will give them an even bigger hand.

computerz420• 2 months ago

Bill Staples and his band of inept buddies (he hired all his ex-MS friends to replace the c-suite at GL) ruin another company and get each other rich via the enshittification of a decent product. Sucks that this company was once one of the good ones.

Having the employees compete in the Hunger Games for their jobs over the next few weeks is just unnecessarily cruel and stupid. Weak leadership, bad strategy.

ngai_aku• 2 months ago

...Annnnd there's the active incident

May 12, 2026 17:56 UTC INVESTIGATING

We are seeing elevated error rates across GitLab.com and GitLab.com services.

We are investigating the issue and will continue to update as we have more information.

May 12, 2026 17:37 UTC INVESTIGATING

We're investigating elevated error rates on GitLab.com. Some users may experience intermittent failures or degraded performance while we work to identify the cause.

We'll share another update as soon as we have more information.

------

https://status.gitlab.com

vira28• 2 months ago

If I have to guess on why they are providing voluntary exit option, because they have a lot more folks from Europe.

sudb• 2 months ago

the TAM is exploding at a step function rate

This stumped me for a while! what are the interpretations, infinite or 0?

porknbeans002• 2 months ago

When you see a decision like this. It's obvious to everyone outside the organization that this is a very bad decision that can only hurt them and their customers. And you want there to be a lever to pull to call a bet on the executives responsible. So that when this blows up in their face. As we all know it to be a certainty that it will. That they will all be fired and all of their compensation clauses are voided.

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

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