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by griomnib 563 days ago
I was actually looking at them as a GitHub alternative and their homepage has so much vaporware AI BS on it that’s as far as I got.

Ironically I was very open to paying for a service, but the “AI AI AI!” lost them at least one sale.

3 comments

I was at a 'techtalk' recently with over 100 attendees, where Gitlab was a sponsor and the second of two talks. Before either talk the GitLab person gave a short pitch on the whole GitLab AI developer productivity vision and how great they are.

There was a short break after the first talk concluded during which about a third of the attendees left, myself included.

I am confused. What is the lesson to be learnt here? Did the last two talks look boring? ... And that is why you left? Were people annoyed with pre-talk pitch by GitLab?
People heard the AI spiel and lost interest.
This press release makes a big deal out of them counting "more than 50% of the Fortune 100" as customers, which goes a long way towards explaining their decline in favor among devs. They're not interested in your sale any more, they're only interested in large enterprises, and are apparently doing very well in that market.
I doubt 50% of Fortune 100 customers are all in on GitLab. My guess is most of their F100 customers are acquisitions that were using Gitlab and continue to use Gitlab.

When my company was acquired by $MegaCorp, I noted one of vendors was like "trusted by $MegaCorp" because yes technically, they got a check from $MegaCorp but $MegaCorp was not interested in becoming further customer.

Or one or two devs in the F100 customers made an account using their work email so they could chuck some OSS prototype code somewhere, or test something out.
Yes I've seen it a place I've worked - GitLab is pushing hard on AI right now, and I don't believe it's cheap either.

Ironically, the JetBrains autocomplete is better than their DUO plugin - JetBrains is faster and the GitLab plugin causes my IDE to completely lock up at least once a day.