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".
> hundreds/user/month
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.
Is the underlying assumption that gitlab will see new paying users because more people are buying coding agents?
If gitlab thinks they are as famous as github i don't know what to say. They should have atleast positioned themselves as a better github alternative
> Do these people get together to discuss their talking points?
None of these visionaries and thought leaders have ever had an original idea in their lives, they just ape eachother.
The average value an individual software is lower but the volume is definitely higher, if github imploding regularly is any indication