Gitlab and Google Cloud Partner to Expand AI-Assisted Capabilities

I think my productivity would 2x or 3x if gitlab would work on fixing issues with core features such as task planning. There's a lot of minimum viable features that never got improved, especially for those of us on the premium tier.

AI sound cool but at this point I'm just expecting another half baked feature that checks boxes for executives to justify purchasing it.

I fear this is going to be the cause of the slow death of gitlab. They over-promised on far too many features and have underdelivered with many half baked products and MVPs that have been left to rot. I like the product and the company but they clearly tried to do too much in order to gain market share. GitHub needs competition so it would be great for GitLab to thrive, but the state of the product worries me.

I understand your frustration. I recently switched from gitlab to gitea[1] because the feature set is pretty damn close to github and has much more sane UI in comparison to gitlab

[1] https://gitea.io

Yup, it's "funny" that even basic functionality doesn't work as expected: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab/-/issues/350662

I encounter this issue pretty often and it makes code review experience miserable. It's not blocking any work, but it is frustrating enough that for any new project I would try to avoid using Gitlab

GitLab task planning is so terrible we had to give up on it and move to Linear. It's like night and day. I can create ten tickets in Linear in the time it takes me to open the right GitLab board. The good thing is that this has probably saved us money as now fewer people need GitLab licenses.

> core features such as task planning.

Or core features such as actual git reliably working well. Yesterday all my pulls/pushes were slow - I timed one push at over 2 minutes!

> AI sound cool but at this point I'm just expecting another half baked feature that checks boxes for executives to justify purchasing it.

Its unfortunate, but just fixing and making an existing product awesome has lower ROI than implementing good-enough features that your competitor has. It may sound stupid, but works business wise.

Curious what you don't like about task planning? I found it both extensive and flexible to just about anything I could want to do with it.

Task planning doesn't increase shareholder value.

How would you fix it?

> GitLab plans to improve its customers' DevSecOps workflow efficiency by 10x, by applying AI-assisted workflows

I'm also planning to improve my fitness by 10x from tomorrow. Using AI obviously! But today let me eat this pizza

Fitness? It's called GymRunOps in 2023.

You have the right level of cynicism, but you should instead direct it at the field of DevSecOps as a whole.

98% of "SecOps" is utterly pointless boxchecking for ass-covering security certifications which waste immense amounts of time and enforce nothing meaningful. You could ABSOLUTELY 10x workflow efficiency there by plumbing the codebase for questions like:

"What are all the OSS libraries you use, and the licenses?"

"What's your test coverage?"

"Do you encrypt your passwords at rest?"

"Are your S3 buckets encrypted?"

instead of wasting developer time answering questionaires nobody reads.

Keep adding TLA...

3DLLMDevSecOpsAIMLBigDataGPU

Indeed - what a crock of shit. And another reason not to trust GitLab.

AI assisted pizza?

> GitLab is working with Google Cloud because of its strong commitment to privacy

Right. I guess they'll also deal with Qualcomm for their strong commitment to openness, and Russia for its strong commitment to democracy.

That's a bit unfair, you shouldn't confuse Google (the b2c services that collect a ton of user data to deliver ads) and Google Cloud Platform.

GCP is genuinely quite open. Whereas AWS have the habit of creating proprietary services/making proprietary changes to open source stuff, a lot of what GCP does is based on open source and open standards, done in public, which they themselves push for. Some of their flagship services such as GKE and Cloud Run, their Service Mesh stuff, Cloud Build, etc. run on software open sourced by Google. Of course that's not always the case - BigQuery is fully proprietary, but it's much better than competitor clouds that release the bare minimum publicly to allow consumption, but don't actually make it possible to do the same thing as GCP on your own outside of their environment.

You're implying that GCP somehow does not keep customers' data private. Do you have evidence for this?

Yeah, because the US is such a beacon to the "democracy".

Maybe GCP, Azure and AWS could pull together the text to train a language model to tell us how to deal with their fucking stupid UIs and arcane terminology. I dread having to use their cloud portals. How do you find a VM by IP address in Azure? that kind of thing.

First, their UI and UX are very different. Azure is by far the worst (as in pretty much all categories) - even their docs suck, with random broken links (even the links to switch the language of the exemple code) and very weird naming schemes, let alone the actual cloud UI. GCP and AWS are quite decent (for AWS you need to know a bit about how they organise things or use the search, but still).

> How do you find a VM by IP address in Azure?

The point is that you probably don't need to/shouldn't. IPs are ephemeral, don't matter and can easily change, and shouldn't be used for anything like identity.

Use the APIs

How quickly things change. I read this as “poor Gitlab had to use whatever janky crap Google can put together” - never mind that Google was a leader in the AI space for years. They completely missed this boat and are instantly looking out of touch.

After 5 years of using gitlab, we’re planning to switch back to GitHub exactly because of copilot and the Polish of their other features. The only hesitation is the SSO tax.

After GitLab's price hikes I've checked their income statements and decided to leave as well.

I'm playing with self hosted Gitea and enjoying so far. Really easy to admin and supports oauth2. It doesn't have all GitLab DevSecOps stuff nor powerful project management features, but we never used those in the first place.

Finally, given current market risks, having less vendors is a huge win.

Why not self-host Forgejo or cgit? Or use Codeberg or SourceHut? There's no reason to eat from the Microsoft hand that his historically always came back to bite developers.

What does repo being on github have to do with copilot? Free copilot licenses for OSS?

Kiss of death for Gitlab? A temporary bump in profits while being technically assimilated by Google due to a significant portion of profits being directly dependent on Google? Now people who don't want to contribute to Microsoft training data sets on Github and escaped to Gitlab will be forced to contribute to Google's training data or forced to migrate elsewhere.

Gitlab cannot compete alone with Github copilot and their other AI offerings, so they bring in Google. Smart, if obvious, move.

Gitlab should stick to its lane and finish its already huge surface area of its products instead of chasing the AI hype. Sid…

> GitLab plans to improve its customers' DevSecOps workflow efficiency by 10x, by applying AI-assisted workflows

How about GitLab fix the most elemental mistakes they have made with the k8s operator for GitLab runner instead of... whatever the hell this is?

GitLab team member here. Thanks for your feedback. I'm curious about what kind of mistakes were made with the Kubernetes Operator [0]? Maybe there are open issues to learn more about your concerns? Thanks!

[0] https://docs.gitlab.com/runner/install/operator.html

Or finally completing their child pipeline feature that was introduced almost 3 years ago

https://gitlab.com/groups/gitlab-org/-/epics/8205

Because AI sounds cool maybe

Why are the links inside the article being redirected through c212.net which in itself redirects to cision.net ? Why not put gitlab links directly inside the article ? What the fuck.

Feels like AI is prompting some sort of tech consolidation pattern getting ready for the "next phase". But there are risks associated with an ever-narrowing set of tech providers, e.g., if this goes in the direction of enhancing lock-in and/or your tech provider becoming your competitor.

The more general (and in some sense gratuitous and unnecessary) risk is the carte-blanche of big tech to pursue any and all business models that are digitally based (e.g. adtech) in any combination they see fit.

Creating and enforcing clear rules about who does what with what responsibilities and liabilities etc would help explore that exciting but also very risky AI enabled "next phase" of IT without constantly second guessing what is really going on and what disasters it might be stoking...

> Feels like AI is prompting..

Pun intended?

All of the links go to some fishy domain c212.net which is blocked by µblock lists.

Why does this feel like a union made in hell?

Partnering with the incomprehensibly byzantine andcomplacent architect of the SEOpocalypse AND "late-to-the-ai-party" Google does not give faith that the solution will be more performant or private than Github's copilot.

This is just another in a series of terrible blunders in the last year that has wiped out any goodwill I had towards gitlab. WTF happened, did they get a new CEO or something?

Prediction: Gitlab will be acquired by Google.

Remember when people were using gitlab because it was an open source bigtech cloud free alternative to GitHub?

At that point there are not anymore good reasons to favor Gitlab against GitHub regarding the path they are following.

Maybe Gitlab can use AI to get their uptime > 90%

They need to make sure not to give it terminal access. It might delete a DB or something from prod [1].

It took a lot of effort to write this with a straight face. Ultimately, I failed.

[1] https://about.gitlab.com/blog/2017/02/01/gitlab-dot-com-data...

Does that mean my code will be pulled into this system automatically?

(Was looking at getting off github due to this being done by Microsoft.)

Google should have purchased GitHub. It'll haunt them for a while.

Sounds like a deal to train vertex ai on enterprise codebase in the name of privacy and security. This doesn’t look like a natural partnership to me.

Google, just buy Gitlab.

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