other.li Forum

@mathaetaes yup.

@maschinentraum I will move to self-hosted Forgejo. Have you looked at Codeberg and SourceHut?

@samueljohn @frumble

@pankraz @toxy yeah, investors are stopping rewarding companies for "AI layoffs" (they are never caused by "AI", but that's a separate thing)

@kedMertens I self-host a GitLab instance, so I will probably deploy Forgejo instead.

@zeh @arclight @radicle as Git intended.

@britter @afterdark "frogjoe" is now a thing.

@luna

@maaikees I am glad you found it useful! And thank you for doing the important yet under-appreciated work of testing and quality assurance.

@zimzat yup.

@rbphotographic I am probably going to replace my GitLab instance with Forgejo.

@heluecht "right-sizing" is just a euphemism for "we, the management, fucked up long-term planning and over-hired; we are bad at our jobs, but since we are calling the shots, we are not the ones who will pay for them."

@Eichi whatever it is, it is a huge red flag and does not deserve the benefit of the doubt.

@lazyb0y no amount of description, however "thorough" or "precise", will be enough. Dijkstra knew this decades ago:
https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667.html

@toxy it is.

And if you've read that far and you're in IT, I have one word for you: unionize.

GitLab's CEO writes:
> Humans still own the judgment that matters most: architecture, deep understanding of the customer problem, the tradeoffs that require taste.

I hold judgement over this decision.

I see it as a symptom of lack of understanding of how good software is actually built. And of greed, directed by the hype train and FOMO.

And I find this blogpost, and the whole idea of pushing slop generators tasteless.

The push for this is about labor, and is about power. CEOs all around the world have wet dreams of never having to pay people ever again. Of never having to hire people.

Slaves would be good though.

And AI "agents" is the closest CEOs can get to slaves. The next closest thing are employees that are too terrified of getting fired to stand up for themselves.

No surprise, then, that in this same blogpost, in the same breath, GitLab's CEO announced layoffs.

The outcome of this will be *worse* software.

It will feel even more plastic, it will be even more brittle, and it's not because we don't know how to write better, more reliable software, but because the industry decided that writing better software is not how money is made.

And GitLab just went all-in, announced to the world: we're here for plastic software, we're here for shit quality code, we're here for forcing people to review unreviewable slop and then blaming them for the bugs.

Software has been "built by machines, directed by people" for decades.

That's what compilers and linkers do, that's what uncountable lines of Bash and endless CI/CD pipelines are – machines building software, directed by people.

And for decades, the bottleneck has not been churning out code. It was code review, it was quality control, it was bug fixing. AI slop makes that *worse*, not better:
https://freakonometrics.hypotheses.org/89367

GitLab, and the rest of the industry, is solving for the wrong problem.

Welp. I've been using GitLab for over a decade and have been pretty happy with it. Deployed and maintained several instances, some personal, some for small hobby orgs, some for work.

But it looks like it is time to ditch GitLab for good:

> 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.
https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

#GitLab #AI #FuckAI #SoftwareDevelopment