Thanks for asking! My initial prompt is like starting a new project with gstack's side project mode. It does do a web search for whether there is an existing LLM wiki typo correction solution, but it does not tell Claude to try to improve based on a conventional NLP approach rather than trying to write everything from scratch.
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.
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.
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".
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?
Presumably based on the fact that the OpenAI/Anthropic $200/month plans are selling like hot-cakes, and it's not often that a new software category comes around which attracts those kinds of per-seat prices.
> 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:
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.
> The idea that understanding code by reading it is as good as understanding it from writing it, in my opinion, is not realistic.
As one of those developers who has written almost no significant code by hand since November 2025, but has produced a great deal of working software, I still understand the majority of the code I've produced just as well as if I'd typed it myself.
I may not be typing it myself, but I'm manipulating it constantly. It's not as simple as "reading" it - I'm reading it, executing it, figuring out refactorings for it, having tests built for it, having documentation built for it, sometimes writing that documentation myself, spinning up example scripts that use it, then building new code that depends on that previous code.
It's that act of exercising the code that gives me confidence that I understand it.
I've been releasing open source software for ~25 years at this point. The goal of that was always to save other developers time, as part of a collaboration where other open source developers save me time with their own work.
This is such a misleading title. The post isn't about software engineering not being a lifetime career, it's about this:
> If AI does turn out to make you dumber, why can’t we just keep writing code by hand? You can! You just might not be able to earn a salary doing so, for the same reason that there aren’t many jobs out there for carpenters who refuse to use power tools.
The argument the piece makes is that being a software engineer who insists on writing code by hand may no longer be a lifetime career.
I think the definition of "software engineer" is changing, and it's not even changing that much. We construct software to help solve human problems. We can keep on doing that, just now we get to do it more.
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