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GitLab Act 2 - A letter to our customers and our investors. (about.gitlab.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/selfhosted@lemmy.world
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Lots of layoffs ("re-evaluating our operational footprint") and switching to "agentic" processes. Target user is AI.

Anyone still hosting Gitlab?

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[–] 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

@Bazoogle @1hitsong First of all - when it comes to creating programs, you want the output to be deterministic. Stochastic program output is a serious problem, as you will get unreproducible bugs. Second, plain language is not easy except for the simplest of tasks. Actual programs need to handle all kinds of corner cases and hardware weirdness and human weirdness. Your "plain language" goes from "do a thing" very quickly to "do a thing. but not that thing. or that other thing. and and and.."

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago (1 child)

    Your “plain language” goes from “do a thing” very quickly to “do a thing. but not that thing. or that other thing. and and and…”

    Your options would be write all those things in plain language, or program them all eith (hopefully) no mistakes, bugs, or vulnerabilities. Either way you have to catch all the situations. Even in plain language, not everybody will be able to effectively use AI to generate code. You need to have a solid understanding of software architecture to be able to get useful output.

    when it comes to creating programs, you want the output to be deterministic

    AI is capable of writing deterministic programs.

    I would also like to preemptively emphasize that AI is not there yet. I am simply talking about the concept of machines creating software. If you try to step back from your anti-AI gut reaction and truly think about it, it would make sense to do if we get there technologically

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  • [–] 1 point 5 months ago

    I don't know why anyone should take your post seriously when you say that AI isn't there yet. You're saying, purely hypothetically, that AI could do these things, if it existed, which it doesn't. That can't be argued against because no matter what anyone points to, you can just say that isn't it.

    But, like, your basic premise that machines would be the best programmers of machines is inherently flawed because humans created those machines, and thus it should actually stand that humans would thus be the best programmers of those machines. But that's a reductive argument that kinda is more tell than show.

    Programming is really just some layer of abstraction on modifying how a computer works, so vibecoding should really be just another layer to that abstraction. But as it stands now (and how we have specifically created our current LLMs), these outputs are not deterministic, and thus sort of fail as a means to program with. That's one of dozens of reasons of why it fails as a programming substitute.

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