u/ai_but_worse

First it was Coinbase firing 14%​ of their workforce to become an AI native company. Now GitLab just announced they are gutting up to three layers of management and laying off people to prepare for what their CEO literally called the agentic era.

We need to call this exactly what it is. This is not about AI optimization or a sudden leap in internal automation. It is pure AI washing.

These companies are not firing hundreds of engineers, managers, and product leads because their internal agents suddenly became so capable that they do not need human oversight. Anyone actually building in the trenches right now knows that AI cannot reliably maintain a massive enterprise codebase or orchestrate complex DevOps without heavy human in the loop architecture.

They are firing people because saying you are restructuring for the agentic era immediately pumps the stock price. It is the ultimate cover story for basic cost cutting. They trade their actual builders: ​the people who keep their infrastructure from collapsing ​for a futuristic narrative that appeases their investors and frees up budget to buy more compute.

The incredible irony here is that GitLab built its entire billion dollar empire on the assumption that human developers need tools to collaborate. Now they are completely rebuilding their organizational structure on the assumption that human developers are about to be replaced by agents that do not need collaboration tools at all.

For the people ​​​who spend every single day building real, functional AI workflows, you know exactly how messy these systems are in a production environment. The idea that giant enterprises are already fully autonomous and ready to run on autopilot is a complete delusion.

If you just got caught in one of these restructuring cuts, do not let the corporate PR shake your confidence. The real builders are going to take their severance, step away from the bloated corporate structure, and go build the exact application layer tools these companies will inevitably have to buy back from us in three years.