Live data from Hacker News

GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

about.gitlab.com

481–490 of 750 posts

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#481

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's literally text autocomplete. You can dress it up however you want but it takes input text and outputs the most likely next sequence.

Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion. Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction, but now it's common place. As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum. You can…

> Calling the technology "text auto complete" is not productive to the discussion.

If pointing out the flawed approach to making something more productive isn't productive, then what do you consider to be productive?

> Less than a decade ago the idea that a computer could take a fuzzy human-readable description and turn it into executable code was science fiction

Cobol was sold to people on the idea that anyone could create something with fuzzy human readable description that would result in executable code. That was back in the 60s.

What lessons did we learn?

1) Leaving things to the people who make fuzzy human readable descriptions turns out to be a terrible way to have things implemented.

2) Slowly and deliberately thinking things through before, during, and after implementation always leads to better results.

It's a lesson that keeps needing to be re-learned by people who don't/can't look at things through a historical lens.

It was the same with cobol, as it was with programming in spreadsheets in the 80s, as it was with the nocode movement in the 00s, as it is now again with LLMs in the 20s, and it will be again with a future generation in the 40s.

---

> As is the ability to write long form text, and be so hard to distinguish from real that placing an em dash in your text will cause an uproar on this forum.

Long form text generation that is hard to distinguish from human authored text also goes back to the 60s.

That's when we got the first instances of the Eliza effect.

> You can describe things by their fundamental functions and make many things sound elementary but I find it counter productive given the capabilities we've seen from this technology

The capabilities we've seen are:

- Text prediction/generation

- Inducing the Eliza effect

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#482
post #410
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a lot of downsides to self-hosting your git as well. Especially if you need to deal with high availability, scalability beyond a single server, and/or being open to the public Internet. I'm not saying you should never self-host your git server, but it's not for everyone.

These days even without trying I get more nine than GitHub.

Arguments against self hosting have to change as our SaaS overlords are decaying in front of our very eyes.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#483
post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you.

> AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you. To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly.

> To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly.

How?

It all still functions with text prediction

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a good reminder for people on the limitations of AI (or well OAI gpt 5.3 default model for non paying users), I did an experiment recently (Just a week-ish ago): https://smileplease.mataroa.blog/blog/how-many-e-are-in-stra... image: https://mataroa.blog/images/b5c65214.png but it says that there are 3 e's in strawberry ;) Now this is literally something which occurs because of it being text autocomplete and the i…

Grok auto: 1 “Strawberry” has only one “e”. S T R A W B E R R Y Gemini: There is *1* "e" in the word "strawberry". Seems fine

They meant to say the letter "r".

See: https://fediverse.zachleat.com/@zachleat/116529994444529036

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#485
post #43

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"

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

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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”

Times change, maybe at this point there will be a 'proper system'. Unlike Github and GitLab now...

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#487
post #410
post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There are a lot of downsides to self-hosting your git as well. Especially if you need to deal with high availability, scalability beyond a single server, and/or being open to the public Internet. I'm not saying you should never self-host your git server, but it's not for everyone.

Good thing Github suck at availability and scalability much more than your friendly local sysadmin...

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#488
post #467
post #440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gitlab is looking to lay off people like him. All major tech companies are currently raiding to fire such employees.

Yeah they all want to fire the guys who can make sense of the mess the vibe coders are doing and try to stop it. It will be interesting in the next few years. Assuming we won't be in the 3rd world war thanks to the USA and will have much bigger concerns.

> Yeah they all want to fire the guys who can make sense of the mess the vibe coders are doing and try to stop it.

You're grossly inflating the level of contribution from your average software developer. Are we supposed to believe that the same people who generated the high volume of mess that plagues legacy systems are now somehow suddenly exemplary craftsmen?

Also, it takes a huge volume of wilful ignorance and self delusion to fool yourself into believing that today's vibecoders are anyone other than yesterday's software developers. The criticism you are directing towards vibecoding is actually a criticism of your average developer's output reflecting their skill and know-how once their coding output outpaces or even ignores any kind of feedback from competent and experienced engineers.

What I see is a need to shit on a tool to try to inflate your sense if self worth.

Re: GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

#490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AI is a text autocomplete. This is tge best AI definition i heard and agree with 100% Thank you. To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly.

> To believe that first you would have to ignore tool calling, ReAct loops, and the whole agent feature. That would be silly. How? It all still functions with text prediction

> It all still functions with text prediction

Wilful ignorance can't be fixed. As the saying goes, you can lead a horse to water but you can't make it drink. I can point you to ReAct loops and tool-calling and agent-based systems. If after being pointed those you still choose to be stuck on the "it's just text prediction" then that's a problem you are creating for yourself, and only you can get unstuck on a problem of your own making.

Post reply on HN