Post #2673293

2026-05-12 10:06 UTC

The push for this is about labor, and is about power. CEOs all around the world have wet dreams of never having to pay people ever again. Of never having to hire people. Slaves would be good though. And AI "agents" is the closest CEOs can get to slaves. The next closest thing are employees that are too terrified of getting fired to stand up for themselves. No surprise, then, that in this same blogpost, in the same breath, GitLab's CEO announced layoffs.

Replies (3)

@rysiek@mstdn.social 2026-05-12 10:09

GitLab's CEO writes: > Humans still own the judgment that matters most: architecture, deep understanding of the customer problem, the tradeoffs that require taste. I hold judgement over this decision. I see it as a symptom of lack of understanding of how good software is actually built. And of greed, directed by the hype train and FOMO. And I find this blogpost, and the whole idea of pushing slop generators tasteless.

Open ##2673294
@svavar@masto.svavar.com 2026-05-12 11:14

@rysiek@mstdn.social More than this, they also want it to be impossible to create software without renting all the tools from a capitalist. They're trying to end the era of anyone being able to ship software using cheap commodity hardware and free tools.

Open ##2673313
@causticmsngo@mastodon.social 2026-05-14 21:51

@rysiek@mstdn.social This is astute. A barrel of oil has the energy of around 20,000 hours of human labor. Four barrels contains the energy output of an entire working lifetime of a person. So we pump the equivalent of 20 million slaves out of the ground every day. They imagine AI as the equivalent for intellectual labor & will make them as fabulously wealthy as oil made the original capitalists.

Open ##2673316