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.

  > my sense is that the return to vibes hiring (and RIF-ing) is resulting in very actionable discrimination cases.

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"

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.

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.

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/

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

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

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".

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

>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.

> 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.

I'm happy I'm no longer a shareholder of this company.

Software stocks won't win longterm if their value proposition is "we vibe code now".

> 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.

Oh and it won't be done until June 1st, so the employees can have some anxiety until then. As a treat.

Time to tell everybody about Forgejo, again.

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?

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)

“ 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…

What a shock, company whose share price is in the shitter lays people off and blames AI.

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).

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....

> 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.

Here's their soon to be updated(?) handbook with the CREDIT values:

https://handbook.gitlab.com/handbook/values/

I have no doubt that with the properly applied power of AI, Gitlab too can make their product worse.

I assume my company's annual bill will be streamlined accordingly.

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?!

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!

Imagine how refreshing if the press release simply said:

"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"

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?

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.

GitLab workers could do the funniest thing and all take the voluntary package.

Sure am glad I moved everything off of Gitlab awhile ago. Trainwreck of a company.

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.

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".

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.

This title is editorialized - the original title is "GitLab Act 2" and both the workforce reduction and CREDIT values pieces are hidden in among the details.

> We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs to speed us up, and plan to right-size roles across the company to follow suit.

Ah, yes, finally gitlab will have the same uptime leves as GitHub.

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.

I recently switched everything from bitbucket to GitHub mostly just because GitHub is more integrated with the AI tools I use. I feel like they’re probably still pretty big in Europe, but they’re losing in some markets more than before.

A reminder that every line of code written is a liability, not an asset.

If I had any inkling of giving GitLab a try, this killed it.

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.

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.

Someone should gather all the creatively worded layoff announcements and put them into a museum.

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...

“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 .... Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale. The monolith is giving way to modern, API-first, composable services.”

Hmm, does the CEO of — checks notes — “GitLab” know what Git is?

I tried a self-hosted GitLab on a 64 core beast of a machine with Optane drives. Completely empty of content, there were multi-second delays everywhere. Horrified at what must lurk beneath the façade, I switched to Forgejo, Crow CI and YouTrack and couldn’t be happier.

>Better pay.

>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.

We're going to turn our infrastructure in to code slop in the hope that we can scale to host all of your code slop in the same way that GitHub's code slop has failed to host code slop.

I genuinely don’t know what “ Git itself is being reengineered for machine scale “‘means not what “rebuilding the CI/CD as orchestration layer” means.

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)

Isn't there like 100 ways to host git repos now?

All these corporations either showing their true colors because the current admin, or they're scared to death of the current admin. Either way, it's fuck employees!

Is there a polymatket for when its gonna be layoff due to hantavirus overhiring?

GitLab has achieved "AGI" internally.

When everyone is leaping head-over-heels into AI / agents, you need SOME part of your stack that is NOT that - slow, tested changes you can (mostly) trust, not "break everything quickly - again" stuff.

Imagine if gcc / clang decided to let agents implement new features without a lot of checking..

Having used AI to write code, and seen the bs it outputs half the time, any org speed running to a parallel autonomous unreviewed code base is going to get hit with a massive rude awakening when their cluster f of a codebase melts down.

Bleh. I was considering moving to GitLab from GitHub for future IaC work given the latter’s issues of late, but this sends me back to the drawing board.

Funny enough it’s not the agentic pivot or AI injection that’s sending me running, though, but the dropping of DEI from their values. Queer folk are still out here fighting tooth and nail for basic opportunities to put roofs over our heads, PoC still out here getting harassed and harmed by cops, disabled folk still struggling for basic accommodations so they can contribute rather than languish. DEI isn’t something you pick up when the popular movement swings towards it as a method of convenience, it’s a value you have to live by especially when times are tough and countries harass you for it.

Fuck you, GitLab.

I'm sorely disappointed by gitlab, I was hoping they would be a safe harbor against this whole AI bullshit typhoon.

It's truly amazing that GitLab has 2,500 employees to begin with when I haven't ever encountered a single company or project using their services, besides one or two obscure open-source project once every few years.

what value does gitlab provide that some glue scripts dont i am sorry

« See how agentic AI transforms software delivery »

Just today we started a new cycle at work to move from GitHub to Forgejo, its such a refreshing tool... So fast, supports everything we need (and more), and no AI slop. Very happy with our decision

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TLDR: Because of AI the future belongs to the engineers, so we took the noble decision to stop hoarding them on our payroll and make sure there are enough to go around for the other companies.

>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.

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...

Makes sense! I’ve worked with teams where the main bottleneck wasn’t technical complexity or even the company itself; it was a people problem.

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!

How many people are at GitHub these days? I interviewed there just less than a decade ago and they REALLY did not like me. I kept yammering on about ensuring your KPIs are correct and making sure people felt psychologically safe. I think this was just after they were nabbed my MSFT and it felt like they were panicking, trying to figure out what would become of them now that they had been swallowed by a whale.

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.