alt Hacker NewsGitLab announces workforce reduction and end of their CREDIT values
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> 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
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 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.
Wrote a bit more about this on my blog: https://simonwillison.net/2026/May/11/gitlab-act-2/
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 rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up
Is this also in the list of "we create code twice as fast and the bottleneck is review so YOLO no bottleneck?". I've yet to see a convincing justification for this. If anything, if you're going full throttle all the more reason to watch the steering wheel, no?
That said, 8 layers of management is a lot of management, and every line of the message seems like leadership truly believes they are sinking in bureaucracy. Let's see how unneeded those 3 layers they're cutting were.
After CVE-2023-7028 (account takeover via password reset, IIRC you just had to add a semi-colon between the correct email and the attacker email and it'd email both) was exploited against my cluster, the boasting about fully-automated changes and reviews scares me. I hope I'm far from the only one that hasn't forgotten issues like this.
I'm aware that the defective code was not written by AI but nonetheless, GitLab is what stands between many small organizations and their most precious resources. I was fortunate that 2FA stopped the damage, but what's going to happen the next time? What if my organization is permanently damaged because we taught the machines to go fast and break things, too [1]?
[1] VPN is an option but we're a non-profit with a number of non-technical users, so admittedly we're caught in a balance between making it harder to do things. As much as WireGuard is awesome, there's still a barrier.
GitLab never ceases to amaze me in terms of just how bad their product roadmap is. Practical things like CI improvements are put off over UI rebranding on unicorn colours. Yet, good tooling is exactly why people used to pay for GitLab. For better or worse maybe this finally can change and we can get more customer oriented roadmaps again
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
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".
GitLab is a great example of a lifestyle company that should have never become a public corporation.
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.
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 VCs.
In a small early stage company you can pretty easily hide each side from the other so you can deliver value to your customers while dancing the VC dance, but as you get larger its harder.
I think founders will endure and VCs will calm down at some point, but there is going to be some suffering along the way.
Oh and have you heard that they built Cluade code with only 20 people? (ignore 12 years of AI research expertise head-start and that Anthropic now has thousands of developers)
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.
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 management features no one is going to end up using anyways.
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"
> Our transparent restructure process creates uncertainty that is real and it's hard, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. I ask that you reflect on the why, what and how and engage your manager in a real conversation about the work, the questions and concerns you have, and what the next chapter looks like for you. Your manager may not have all the answers, because they too are going through this period of uncertainty. The conversation still matters and your input shapes how we land as a team.
Setting aside the whole "I'm not going to pretend otherwise which reads suspiciously like Claude, I don't understand how this is supposed to make employees feel any better. No one knows what's going on and through talking we'll figure it out? Mmmmmmhmmmmmm.
> planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams
One of the really interesting things about GitLab was that not only did they have employees in a large number of countries but they also published their employee handbook which helped show quite how much work it was to support that:
https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/people-group/employment... lists 18 countries right now. I guess they're losing 5 of those.
Here's a permalink to the current version of that page https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/... since it mentions that "Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging is one of our core values" and so is likely to be updated pretty soon!
They even used to have a public payroll.md page detailing how payroll worked in multiple countries - they moved that into their private docs a few years ago but the last public version is here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/content-sites/handbook/-/blob/...
UPDATE: I got the countries piece wrong. The linked OP says:
> Reduced operational footprint: We’re reducing our country footprint because operating in nearly 60 countries does not allow us to give every team member a great experience. We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer. Team members who are in good standing and would like to relocate are welcome to do so. We'll continue to serve customers in those markets through our partner network where appropriate.
I said they operated in 18 countries, so clearly my impression was out-dated and incorrect.
Also "We anticipate reducing the number of countries by 30% focused on geos where we have only a handful of people or fewer" suggests to me that it's a 30% cut to countries with "only a handful of people", not a 30% cut to countries overall.
Layoff something something AI.
Yeah, sure. A couple of years ago it was Covid overhiring.
You know the one thing that is never ever going to be given as a reason for layoffs? The growing salary-productivity gap.
> Where you should expect to see us evolve is in the quality, depth and pace of innovation we ship.
Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.
> 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.
Their old CREDIT values: Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency.
New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.
In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.
>> "We've been working through some significant changes inside GitLab over the past few days"
I can't seem to get past this - all these decisions (and a work-force reduction :() are the result of a few days of pondering? I've had stomach aches that have lasted longer ..
Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.
What would you suggest as an alternative? Gitlab really sucks in my personal opinion, but what are your experiences with:
Gogs https://gogs.io/ (this IS gitea btw)
Forgejo https://forgejo.org/
Self hosted or cloud hosted. Also excluding Github because, please just fracking don't.
What a shock, company whose share price is in the shitter lays people off and blames AI.
>removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work.
I wish them the best of luck with that plan. Middle management is where the institutional knowledge sits on how to actually get shit done despite challenges & broken processes/systems.
It's an even worse plan than eliminating juniors.
“ AI is the substrate on which future software gets built”
- when you see the word substrate in corporate speak, you know where that’s from…
I have no doubt that with the properly applied power of AI, Gitlab too can make their product worse.
Engineering has always been about more than writing code.
That's true, but it's interesting how FizzBuzz as said to be the bete noir of the average dimwitted software developer, and how much cutting-edge engineering organizations used to emphasize code in their recruitment processes.
If writing code is being replaced by "engineering judgement" it's going to need a much smaller cohort of developers. Too many opinions spoil the broth, after all.
It's not clear to me from that post how they will be spending the money they'll save by firing 60% of our R&D team.
Could someone explain it?
If you have a lot of new stuff to build, and if you're not currently losing money, why start a new initiative with a layoff?
Am I alone in being extremely sensitive to LLM-style writing, observing it in this article, and feeling a little upset about that? The letter to employees ticks several of the boxes, and if I’m not wrong that’s kinda shitty. Or perfectly aligned with the spirit of the announcement (or both).
Here's their soon to be updated(?) handbook with the CREDIT values:
> Great engineers are problem solvers and builders who care about system design, distributed systems, reasoning through failures, safely integrating new capability into critical systems, and making decisions under ambiguity.
Yes, and the people who are all-in on agentic AI are, in practically every example I’ve seen, not that. They’re the jackasses giving Claude root access to their prod DB and then writing a blog post about how much they’ve learned from their mistake.
Rather striking statements that have me somewhat concerned:
> Agents open merge requests in parallel, trigger pipelines around the clock, and push commits at a rate no human team ever did. 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. And agent-specific APIs are being built so agents can act as first-class users of the platform, not as bolted-on consumers of human-shaped interfaces
Is there any broader consensus or information on this? Git doesn't scale? is being rebuilt for agents?! Monoliths are out and services are back? Humans are second class citizens now (human shaped interfaces - bad!!)?
What the hell are they planning to do in there at Gitlab?!
GitLab's old values are for now still listed in their handbook:
> GitLab’s six core values are Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency, and together they spell the CREDIT we give each other by assuming good intent. We react to them with values emoji and they are made actionable below.
Since those terms don't speak for themselves individually, it's worth seeing what they're supposed to mean to get a sense of what GitLab is forsaking now. Each section is actually pretty lengthy, so you should go look and skim for yourself.
Here's the page: https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/
And here's an archive from yesterday, for when that changes: https://web.archive.org/web/20260510150031/https://handbook....
I assume my company's annual bill will be streamlined accordingly.
This feels like a massive own goal.
GitHub is publicly destroying itself in a desperate attempt to realize Microsoft's AI dreams, and as its main competitor your response is... to do the same?
Rather than going for a "Humans first, robot assistants welcome" approach which promises to deliver things like stability, reliability, trustworthiness, and human connections, they decide to go all-out on firing the humans and letting bots handle things like code review while explicitly shifting the existing human-first company values towards making the remaining humans responsible for the bot's mistakes.
They could've chosen to market themselves as the sane save haven for the GitHub exodus. Instead they choose to go down in history like Google abolishing "Don't be evil". But hey, I bet chanting "AI! AI! AI!" (albeit quite late to the game) will deliver a very solid lukewarm increase in shareholder value!
Sounds panicky to me... changing everything all at once for all the reasons.
I guess someone will be selling enterprises something that lets them say, "We're doing AI too!" Might as well be gitlab?
I'm glad this website is still alive: https://layoffs.fyi/
It just struck me. I always thought I had writing software to fall back on, in case my main gig doesn't work out. I don't think it will still be there when I'm ready to return.
If you were impacted, Magnetic (AI Tax Prep for CPA firms) is hiring senior - staff level engineers in SF https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/magnetic
Email me subject “gitlab” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
I'd hate to be their customer right now. Is this the only "corporate-scale" forge besides Github?
There's a lot of cool things happening between Gitea/Forgejo, Tangled, and Radical, but I doubt the latter two have any significant usage beyond OSS hobby projects. I'm not sure if the former two do, either.
> the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.
Reduce the work force of 30%. I don't know, dude, you didn't convince me.
Of course this is happening. Gitlab's values were only there for marketing - just take a look at their massive turnover of employees who get burn so fast they don't have time to update the About page fast enough.
Gitlab is a terrible company, period.
Surprised at the negativity here - did most of you read the source ?
They seem to be mostly reducing headcount of managers and claim (supposedly) to be prioritising engineering.
On top of that their redesign sounds interesting - they want to adapt the platform itself (and concept) to deal specifically with how AI "users" will code and submit changes (and the rate of and interaction of that model) vs humans. We'll see how this plays out but this doesn't sound like a bad idea to me at all (assuming humans of course still get priority).
I don't understand how people can use the phrase "right-size" without a crushing sense of embarrassment and shame. Did you swallow a business consultant from 1990? That and phrases like "go forward strategy" say either 1. I do not know how to communicate like a human or 2. I am afraid of speaking naturally because it impinges on my self image as a business leader or 3. I do not want to accurately describe what I'm doing because that might expose my fragile ego to the possibility that I'm doing something which hurts people.
"We're firing a bunch of people because we think we don't need them anymore due to AI and we'll make more money without them."
There are times when businesses must fire people to stay afloat and it's a business that objectively needs to exist. This isn't one of them, so don't waste everyone's time with your BS, please.
I was finding this really interesting, that maybe a human had written it and it really reflected a vision for how we build software in this new world. I want to know the way, I'm curious!
Until I got to "One platform, three modes." and my brain just pattern matched "AI slop" and the entire post dissolved into meaningless for me.
I don't know if I can stop my mind reaching this conclusion. I'm sure someone at GitLab made some effort to carefully edit the post... But that it wasn't entirely rooted in a human who'd worked out how this stuff goes, but clearly had lots of AI writing it out... Just made my instinct go "this isn't worth paying attention to after all".
Not making sense to me at all. The AI era should be a great opportunity for Github to show their reliability and developer-first law, but they decided to all in AI. As a developer, what I need is a well-working repository, not a agent that write, review, even publish the code for me.
Can't imagine that slop is going to save them. Gitlab is a totally directionless, beyond self-hosting which I think is commendable, shoddily implemented product. I don't hate it, in that it is at least predictable, but the lack of basically any interesting view on how software should be developed or even look is such a waste.
How these companies act like these changes are for the better good and how "we are different" is just gross.
The planning is happening openly, including a voluntary separation window. That creates real uncertainty for our team over the next few weeks, but we believe the outcome will be better for it.
"Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
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.