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/
>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.
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.
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.
"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
[0] https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/work_items/588806
> 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".
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Yes, letting some LLMs "plan, code, review, deploy" will for sure improve quality and depth of innovation you ship.
This stumped me for a while! what are the interpretations, infinite or 0?
New values: Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes.
In other words, work harder, not smarter, and no more DEI.
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)
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.
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.
- when you see the word substrate in corporate speak, you know where that’s from…
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?
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.
> 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 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 guess someone will be selling enterprises something that lets them say, "We're doing AI too!" Might as well be gitlab?
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!
May 12, 2026 17:56 UTC INVESTIGATING
We are seeing elevated error rates across GitLab.com and GitLab.com services.
We are investigating the issue and will continue to update as we have more information.
May 12, 2026 17:37 UTC INVESTIGATING
We're investigating elevated error rates on GitLab.com. Some users may experience intermittent failures or degraded performance while we work to identify the cause.
We'll share another update as soon as we have more information.
------
Email me subject “gitlab” if interested - thomas@ our domain (I am the cofounder)
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 ..
"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.
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.
Gitlab is a terrible company, period.
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).
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".
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.
Not even the balls to do the deed yourself. This reads like Shrek's "Some of you may die,... but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make.""Act 2" for crying out loud, get out of town.
Reduce the work force of 30%. I don't know, dude, you didn't convince me.
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 fragmentation allowing for easily picking and choosing for further reduction? Or maybe I'm just too cynical for my own good.
"We over-hired, we're ram-packed full of managers pinging each other on Slack all day and need to cut costs to sustain our operation. We think GitHub's shit and we want to be a nimble org with a fighting chance at eating their lunch. We're also gonna provide 1000 free runner hours/mo to open source projects that move from GitHub to gitlab, and we're gonna make project namespaces on gitlab.com a first class thing like GitHub did"
Ah, yes, finally gitlab will have the same uptime leves as GitHub.
If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.
All free software projects should leave GitLab immediately. Why should we support the IP thieves?
"We did nothing wrong, but ended up in the wrong shape!"
>Once approved, our new bonus program will give every team member who isn’t on an incentive compensation plan or bonus plan today, the opportunity to earn a cash bonus based on their individual performance, targeting 10% of salary, awarded at their manager’s discretion.
LOL. So basically buckle up and do what you're told and grind. And hope your manager likes you or you'll get nothing.
Software stocks won't win longterm if their value proposition is "we vibe code now".
Aside, none of these announcements even attempt to make sense.
GitLab's TAM is exploding, demand is through the roof, LLM tooling is making each IC more productive, and to capatalize on this moment GitLab is
... "transparently restructuring" by asking employees to quit so they don't have to lay off as many...
Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?
Having the employees compete in the Hunger Games for their jobs over the next few weeks is just unnecessarily cruel and stupid. Weak leadership, bad strategy.
Uh, if this is what I think it means, I wouldn't trust using a product where their company thinks that approvals for reviews can be automated.
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 we are witnessing so far has been just the tech world’s reaction. As typical companies catch on to the agentic era, we’re going to see more layoffs. A part of it may be due to “unlocked productivity” but more of it will be to make space in their ranks for hiring more AI native workforce. Which will also be scarce at the beginning.
I think we should get ready to see a very different kind of talent war, and at a scale and pace never seen before.
I think you need to explain it like it’s a bash script else I don’t think you understand it.
(Ironically I don’t think if this article was the prompt, I don’t think an agent would code it up the way you are thinking)
You can always tell when the title is incredibly vague or bereft of details (e.g. "An update about our product") that it's going to be some flavor of either lay-offs, shutting down, or other enshittification.
Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..
What can go wrong.
Now GitLab announces it will have to fire people - the AI slop cuts away at finacnial gains here.
AI slop is killing everything.
almost like a copy of my post :) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47982975
We've seen these tech waves several times - C and COBOL instead os ASM, CAD/4GL, template generation, Visual Basic and the likes (good old Delphi), Java (which allowed to a lot of mid-inept people to write compilable non-immediately-crashing programs), spread of python, and now AI. Every time we have an expansion of the industry, and every time glorious promises which get delivered on modestly. The point here is that they get delivered on.
And with AI i suppose it will be similar, though much better than before. In those previous waves human brain was the limit. This time we throw that limit away from the start - nobody will be able to comprehend the sheer amount of AI-generated code. Yes, that approach will hit some limit down the road of course too...
Things like long discussions over formatting that should just be enforced by linters, pushing non-idiomatic patterns despite official docs and tooling recommending otherwise, or turning simple problems into meetings scheduled “for next week”, "in two weeks", "let's have a meeting and invite everyone" instead of just fixing the issue and opening a PR. Which sometimes takes 10 minutes!
At some point it starts to feel like responsiveness and initiative are treated as threats rather than strengths. Autonomy and ownership matter a lot more than people realize. Wonder how that'll look like!
I've done some organizational consulting in the past, often trying to help companies understand why their employees don't trust management. I suspect the powers that be thought that post was decent, and I think the GitHub survivors will likely ignore most of it. And I don't know anything about what's going on there. But if you told me GitHub employees were made MORE nervous by that post than LESS, I would not be surprised.