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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

#711
post #705

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I'm not seeing the comparison because what you're describing is not at all an internal or emergent process. And (1) that process isn't an autocomplete because it isn't reliably text->text. It could be visual->sound, sound-> action, visual->action or visual->visual or any combination. As well as proactively seeking out new stimulus. Modern LLMs aren't limited to text, they just happen to leverage a large model of th…

Humans obviously need air to breathe. If you give us scuba lessons and extensive gear we can go underwater and keep breathing air, but the fundamental operation doesn't change. It's the same with LLMs. When you send an image to an LLM it's not parsed by the LLM but handed off to a separate program that converts it into a text format for the LLM which then is then sent back to the same old autocomplete process.

And yes humans are born intelligent. Have children and it's the most amazing and beautiful thing watching them begin to create out of nothing. For instance with absolutely zero prompting or external guidance children will begin to engage in intentful make believe play, like starting to share their food with their favorite toy.

But this 'something from nothing' is also essentially required if you think about it. Try to put yourself back in primitive man's shoes some tens of thousands of years ago. You know basically nothing about the world around you, yet in the blink of an eye we've discovered the secrets of the atom, put a man on the Moon, created mathematics from nothing, created all the underlying technology and infrastructure required for us to have our little debate here online, and so much more.

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

#712

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…

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…

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.

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

#713

> 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 fr…

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

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

#714
post #196

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 soft…

> 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.

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

#715
post #331
post #310

> 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 an…

> 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)...

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

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

#716

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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", a…

> We are moving up a layer in terms of abstraction

I’ll believe it when I don’t need to understand the code. Until then it’s just autocompletion with (a lot of) extra steps.

Wake me up when I can actually let agents do the IC work without having to be the accountability sink that gets fired when things go wrong.

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

#717
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.

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

#718

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…

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.

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

#719
post #660

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 l…

> cost will keep going down and more powerful chips will be available, like it always was. cost is not a monotonous function.

compute and memory cost is monotonic with temporary hiccups

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

#720
post #196

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 soft…

> 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.

> 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.

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