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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

#641

Post by somenameforme »

roenxi wrote: post #605
somenameforme wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This retort doesn't make any sense. Take humanity back perhaps 40k years ago and language did not even yet exist. Our token base was 0. Put an LLM in that scenario and it will endlessly cycle on nothing and produce nothing, stuck in a snapshot in time. Put humans in that situation, and soon enough you get us. This is like saying that somebody speaking Chinese is just playing the Chinese Room [1] experiment. The only…

If that is the argument though, current AI aren't just autocomplete - because we could reasonably show an AI an image or a video and have them call a tool rather than return text. That'd be comparable to a pre-language human.

I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process. Without a human there to hand-feed the AI access to create these tools, create the interface, and then hand feed all of it the LLM, none of this happens. This is like Kubrick's monolith, bumped up a few orders of magnitude.

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

#642

Post by freedomben »

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.

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

#643

Post by e_i_pi_2 »

sesm wrote: post #578
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…

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).

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 :/

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

#644

Post by mirekrusin »

lelanthran wrote: post #548
platevoltage wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're not going to get worse. That would be absurd. The rate of progress will slow down though.

> Of course they're not going to get worse. That would be absurd. The rate of progress will slow down though. It's unlikely, but not totally improbable - Model collapse means that the subsequent models would get worse over time, not better .

what's "model collapse"? RL has virtually unlimited ceiling.

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

#645

Post by rirze »

tapoxi wrote: post #297
rirze wrote: post #65

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 manage…

They actually fixed the Gitaly thing a month or two 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...

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

#646

Post by delfinom »

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…

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.

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

#647

Post by mirekrusin »

LtWorf wrote: post #472
platevoltage wrote: post #448

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course they're not going to get worse. That would be absurd. The rate of progress will slow down though.

They might get worse for 2 reasons: 1. AI free training sets no longer exist. This might degrade quality, although some claim that it will not. 2. Cost. Right now they are burning a lot of money to convince people it's good. But they might not be able to keep it up forever and need to increase prices (which few will want to pay) or degrade the quality to save money.

non synthetic pre-training text got exhausted long time ago, now focus is more on quality and rl/post-training.

cost will keep going down and more powerful chips will be available, like it always was.

reinforcement learning doesn't have fixed ceiling, advancements in software will keep happening as well.

things like distilling smaller models will likely become free – ie. through speculative decoding which speeds up larger models (incentive to run during inference) where you have free access to strong distillation (large model's logits are calculated, ie. it's free for pickup for distillation) etc.

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

#648

Post by hombre_fatal »

duxup wrote: post #618
hombre_fatal wrote: post #614

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Good point. Related: a lot of what seem like simple tickets require a real conversation about "well, how should this work?"

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

#649

Post by conciliatory »

andrewstuart2 wrote: post #188
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…

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 inpu…

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...

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

#650

Post by esafak »

servo_sausage wrote: post #595
mullingitover wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The irony is that DEI promotes merit by forcing companies to justify hiring beyond basic “cultural fit” vibes. I’ve been in the business and seen a ton of hires on vibes. DEI actually asked people to expand the talent search, not hire anyone unqualified (which is what the anti-DEI folks are desperate to have us believe it did). I predict some major EEO lawsuits will eventually bring the pendulum back in the other dir…

If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI. Ive seen many cases where HR stalls hiring until the most qualified candidates move on, prefilter insufficiency "diverse" candidates from the pool presented to teams, or implement internal quotas to meet external funding or contract requirements. Not to mention the actual external requirements for "diversity" from public tender proce…

> If DEI operated on merit, there would be no need for the special new concept of DEI.

Yes, there would, because un-diverse candidates (not white, young males from a handful of schools) would never get their foot in the door. Companies only interview a small fraction of their candidates.

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