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GitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values

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

#551

Post by LtWorf »

locknitpicker wrote: post #537
LtWorf wrote: post #507

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen which developers became vibecoders. They were the people I'd have wished to get rid of. The ones who never acknowledge a mistake even if the process is crashing; the ones who put "return true" in a test so that the test doesn't execute and will insist that you broke their code if you remove the return true and when the test actually runs it fails; the ones who read a blog post about some new thing and decid…

> I've seen which developers became vibecoders. They were the people I'd have wished to get rid of. Trying to portray everyone who ever used a tool as the incompetent cohort is an exercise in self-delusion.

Using AI ≠ vibecoding.

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

#552

Post by oblio »

ricardobayes wrote: post #549
drdrek wrote: post #535

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…

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.

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.

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

#553

Post by oblio »

KaiserPro wrote: post #542
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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)

What's wrong with Ceph?

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

#554

Post by ForHackernews »

torben-friis wrote: post #70

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 re…

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

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

#555

Post by siva7 »

array_key_first wrote: post #449
siva7 wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Right but naturally that's not actually why they're doing it. In actuality, it's a layoff - they did not go through and analyze which employees are "keeping up" and which aren't, don't be so naive. This, like virtually all layoffs, is for economic reasons. Of course you can't say that because that reflects poorly on your growth and makes your investors uneasy and yadda yadda yadda. But what do investors like? Hm? AI!…

> they did not go through and analyze which employees are "keeping up" and which aren't, don't be so naive.

they do on the org level. that's not news for anyone who has worked at upper mgmt level in corporations. rule no.1 is you keep your mouth shut about anything there. and of course it's for economic reasons.. it's a business, not a charity to provide lifelong employment for employees who aren't aligned to mgmt goals. Mgmt tells stories depending on who asks. Levels below execute them (by identifying those who aren't aligned).

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

#556

Post by rcxdude »

oblio wrote: post #552
ricardobayes wrote: post #549

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

One issue I have with them is that they pretty much had all the features I use a few years after they started, and they have, for the most part, just kept adding new ones of dubious value instead of polishing the core ones.

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

#557

Post by rcxdude »

argee wrote: post #230
solid_fuel wrote: post #172

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.

Reminds me of when microwaves first came out. Investors decided to go all in on "vibe cooking" (lit. cooking with vibrations) complete with microwave ranges (no conventional oven), until the public wizened up to the fact that there was in fact no cooking (Maillard reaction) involved in their vibe cooking. Took about 15-20 years but microwaves finally took their rightful place as a utility appliance rather than what t…

The Maillard reaction is not the be all and end all of cooking, mind.

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

#558

Post by morningsam »

dude250711 wrote: post #533
vultour wrote: post #515

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 a…

Even slop-maker-makers themselves struggle: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues What hope slop-maker-users have then?

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.

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

#559

Post by rcxdude »

solid_fuel wrote: post #388
u_fucking_dork wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your house is literally just a box. You can dress it up however you want but it has 4 walls and a lid.

Mine has like, 8 walls, but sure. It's a box. Crucially, it was sold as a box. Not a thinking machine. Your attempt at an analogy will make sense when someone tries to install a house as middle management at some company.

I'm pretty sure it was sold as a house. That you understand that you can think of it as a box doesn't make it not a house. That's the point of the analogy.

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

#560

Post by locknitpicker »

solid_fuel wrote: post #539
locknitpicker wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 o…

> 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 proble…

> Tool calling? The model emits JSON as it autocompletes the prompt, and the json is then parsed out and transformed into an HTTP call.

No. Code assistants determine which tool they can execute to meet a specific goal. They pick the tool, the execute the tool (meaning, they build command line arguments, run the command line app, analyze output, assess outcome) as subtasks.

And they do it as part of ReAct loops. If the tool fails to run, code assistants can troubleshoot problems on the fly and adapt how to call then tool until they reach the goal.

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