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  • Hacker News
  • > 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.

    by TeeWEE
  • > 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)...

    by yalok
  • 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.

    by lbotos
  • > 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/

    by Imustaskforhelp
  • 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.

    by skrrtww
  • 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.
    by internet101010
  • 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.
    by laweijfmvo
  • >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...

    by morningsam
  • 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.
    by tootie
  • 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.
    by ai_fry_ur_brain
  • > 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)

    by bayindirh
  • 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".

    by simonw
  • The average value an individual software is lower but the volume is definitely higher, if github imploding regularly is any indication
    by morkalork
  • > 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?

    by rdedev
  • 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.
    by fidotron
  • 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.
    by bmitch3020
  • Brother there’s nothing to capitalize on. They really don’t want an avalanche of free users bringing their shit down too I think.
    by u_fucking_dork
  • GitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.
    by shimman
  • They have almost a billion dollars in revenue
    by dmix
  • Aha, it's public. That explains the inflated employee count. Same story every time.
    by elktown
  • 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.
    by SimpleSalmon
  • 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

    by petetnt
  • 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.
    by whalesalad
  • 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

    by verall
  • 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?
    by Banditoz
  • 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.

    by vultour
  • 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.

    by porknbeans00
  • 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.

    by dzonga
  • 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.

    by delfinom
  • > 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?

    by siva7