rip to gitlab, who have decided to destroy their entire business for no reason https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

@jacqueline so lemme get this right: GitHub is currently collapsing under the weight of slop (both the slop they themselves are shipping + all the repo's created in the slop factories) and the correct move from GitLab, the obvious main competitor, is to shoot themselves in the leg by doing the same thing and getting rid of people!?

My stupid simple mind cannot comprehend these levels of capitalistic brilliance.

@jacqueline "Reduce the number of countries" sounds ominous

@jacqueline I understand that this isn't for everyone, but it's amazing how many problems I've managed to avoid by simply pushing my code to manually configured git remotes over ssh.

@ansuz doesn't sound like you're ready for the agentic future!

@jacqueline every day I look for new ways to be left behind 🙃​

@ansuz @jacqueline put that on stickers and shirts!

@jacqueline to be honest, if you throw out all the AI marketing speech away, it's not even that bad of a plan. They're:
1. 10x-ing their infrastructure
2. Keeping engineering teams small and end-to-end responsible
3. Adding new APIs to explore the codebase
4. Improving authentication infrastructure

I feel like there was an engineer behind that plan who was like, "yeah you can throw in agentic AI bullshit, but I'm building for humans"

@jacqueline Oh fuck, you aren't kidding!

Role right-sizing: As we shift to a new strategy and way of working, powered by AI, we must revisit the size of staffing for each role to ensure we are optimizing for speed and customer outcomes. In some cases, AI can augment and accelerate what team members have been doing, in other places we need to expand certain roles to go faster. We do expect daily use of AI by every individual in the company and we are launching AI acceleration programs to support every role as part of our transformation.

🤢

@jacqueline Looks like I now finally need to migrate my stuff somewhere else....

Was on my list for some time anyhow, this is just the final drop ...

@jacqueline bit late to the party, no? Do they have a burning desire to be the bag holder?

corporations when they have to do nothing to stay alive: wait a minute we could fuck up hard

@jacqueline

Reading the meaty parts about how they'll 'operate going forward', and you get all you need to know in a few words...

"Our three new operating principles are:

Speed with Quality ... "

You never, ever get both. History is littered with companies that tried and failed.

"Ownership Mindset"

Really? Employees who own none of it should just act like they do, 'cause, ya know... Yeah, Team!

"Customer Outcomes"

They've already watched GitHub implode, so yeah, more of that, please!

@jacqueline for a magical moment they created a few dollars of shareholder value

@jacqueline we could see it coming with their new ceo.

@jacqueline
i&i love this sentence buried somewhere in the mail to employees:

"I want to be direct: I want to do this once, and do it right, and not revisit our structure anytime in the foreseeable future."

oh yeah. like, you think you're building the Parthenon or what? with AI chunks?
this joke makes my day.
the funniest/saddest is he must think his tone is one of "mitigation" someway.. oh my..

@ansuz

I love me some Joy Of Missing Out. Big fan, been doing it all my life. Welcome aboard.

@jacqueline

@theeclecticdyslexic @ansuz @jacqueline hello friends 👋

@ansuz @jacqueline
hardcore JOMO! yeah! ̅ ̆̅ ̅ ͜ ̅ ̅ ̅

@jacqueline 8 layers of management is pure madness, but the reduction of that is probably the only positive thing I can read out of this thing...

@jacqueline

Getting rid of git is amusing. Too much tracking, too many humans poking their nose in at what the agentic oroborus is doing.

@ansuz @jacqueline It pains me how relatable that sentence is.

@jacqueline as a corporate Gitlab customer, that's a big ouch.

@jacqueline More people heading to @Codeberg then

@jacqueline What a pile of absolute horseshit. I'm glad I never wasted the energy to move from GitHub to GitLab, only to have the rug pulled out from under me. Thank heavens for Forgejo.

@jacqueline goddamn I’m glad I left working in tech. It’s a mess covered in AI slop and condescension

@jacqueline

@jacqueline What happened to git providers?

@jacqueline "We're rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs..." Like yeah, you know, what could go wrong... 😅

@jacqueline run you own @forgejo https://forgejo.org/ its been amazing for my projects. Data is owned and stored in our control. Changes happen when we dicide to make changes. Runs smoothly provide plenty of the benefits needed. I think all these moves away from improving the foundational products and solving the core value proposition will just push more people back to owning there own infra. Its much much cheaper.

@jacqueline byeeeeeeeee

@jacqueline Regardless of whether people are going to be *using* LLMs and agentic setups to write code, it still doesn’t follow that the infrastructure they use to do so should *also* be similarly disrupted.

I think the main problem is that boring infrastructure companies aren’t fashionable or exciting, so their top management will always have a tendency to want to turn them into something they’re not and shouldn’t be.

@jacqueline

I'm so sick of that "we need to move fast" mentallity. Why would we need that? What's the point? If anything I want (need!) a slower world.

@jacqueline Wow, thrown away their key differentiator!

@lumiworx also "Reduced operational footprint" makes it sound like "We'll fire people in less privileged countries that have fewer tech workers and double down on the ones where there are many people already"?

> 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.

@jacqueline

@jacqueline what i got from reading that article is that bill staples is to blame

@jacqueline

Codeberg seems to be the place to be these days.

@mcv @jacqueline Please remember to donate, @Codeberg got to finance the upcoming exodus of actual developers to their platform somehow.

@Natanox alternative way to help out: I'm not in a position to donate, but I am in a position to selfhost and use other Forgejo installations. I think people who are able to do this could help out in that way too, because it'd reduce the load on Codeberg and free up space for people who really need it?

(But yes, do donate if you can, in addition or otherwise)

@mcv @jacqueline @Codeberg

@gabrielmarkley the whole ChatGPT situation made me feel happy about my decision to switch to GitLab back when GitHub was acquired by Microsoft all those years ago

And now this is making me feel good about my decision to ditch GitLab, too, in favour of Codeberg, Disroot's Forgejo instance, and other Forgejo's around the world

Looks like I'm somehow always a step ahead of the game

@jacqueline @forgejo

@jacqueline Smacks of principals taking the money and running, while obvious collapses of numerous supportive #ecosystem disintegration comes to a head. If you have similar investments, get out while you can.

@Skye @youam @jacqueline known in the industry as the firefox gambit.

@jacqueline i wonder what it is that makes everyone step on this AI rake.
even companies that go “we’re not going to fuck up the same way our competitors are” are fucking up the same way their competitors were.

@badrihippo @jacqueline

Unraveling the corporate speak, it might be worse than just letting people go for some 'efficiency'.

'Reduced footprints' like they describe happen by shrinking what's costing them in more than just money, and in whichever locations they already perceive to be ineffective or have a known impediment to saying yes to this new strategy.

They expected pushback as they set this up and want to lop off the trouble spots and gain loyalty from fear of it happening to others.

@jacqueline SMDH at the idea that we need more volume of software. No, we need *better* software.

@jacqueline my god. These consultants that are pushing every business over the same cliff need to be placed against the wall

@jacqueline They had investors, so deserved.

They needed to be privately owned, period. That way, this nonsense didn't happen.

This is why I Codeberg.

@jacqueline i guess hard drive prices are going up too.

@jacqueline

GitHub: Hold my beer!
GitLab: Hold GitHub's beer!
Codeberg: I've got a couple of extra beers.

@jacqueline wow.

Almost as bad as the blender thing. The only way this could be worse is if this were a post to social media, open to replies.

Those cretins in charge of such entities don't seem to understand "target market" too well.

But, hey, niche JUST OPEN to whoever takes their place

#GitLab

@jacqueline "the agentic era" dear geebus

@jacqueline Holy shit. The crash is gonna be sooooo brutal for these folks. Imagine an engineer interviewing at a new aircraft company because he invented an auto-pilot that flew the airplane into the ground which put the previous company out of business.

@jacqueline "As the cost of producing software collapses, demand for it will expand."

So...now that there is allegedly a magic automatic widget making machine that anyone can use to make their own widgets...the widget business is looking up?

@jacqueline entirely off topic but ohhhhhh their cookie consent popup is EVIL lmao

@jacqueline Gods, I'm glad I retired a few years ago. They used to subcontract installations and training to my company.

@ansuz @jacqueline Fear Of Being Included

@Kroc @ansuz @jacqueline FOBI, which sounds eerily similar to phobia 😅

@siguza @Kroc @jacqueline calling it a fear or phobia seems like exactly the sort of thing the AI hype crew would like

@jacqueline So glad I moved to @forgejo about a year ago !

@jacqueline @simonnickel @Jargoonco
I wonder when #xcode or @fork_dev will add #codeberg into their Accounts features?

@jacqueline "We're building identity, audit, policy, and deployment flexibility as core platform services that every agent, pipeline, and merge request runs through by default, rather than a separate product layered on top." If they'd built their infrastructure around OpenLDAP, instead of SQL, all of that would have already been built in.

@jacqueline „The agentic era multiplies demand for software.“ reads for me like „Software for the sake of software“… But well, I always loved reading Aldous Huxley and Philip K. Dick and wondered „How would I act in such an environment?“ So it‘s a great opportunity to find out myself.

@led02 @jacqueline yes, that was my impression too. A serious tail-wagging-the-dog vibe.

The world doesn't need more software, written 1000x faster than today. The world doesn't even need 90% of the software that already exists, the vast majority has been crap for decades now.