My extremely cynical, but not yet proven wrong view:

Tech, more or less, has a group of investors centered around Silicon Valley. Not the only ones, but especially now, the most active. Generally, these folk have a lot of exposure to AI, and probably mostly believe the hype around it.

Which means they believe companies using AI should produce better results, which in the current market means short-term cash. So if a company doesn't do layoffs, no matter how well it is doing, it is seen as irresponsible and investment is withheld from it.

GitLab's announcement felt illustrative of this dynamic:

- The actual reductions were focused on simplifying org structure, nothing to do with AI

- They identified MORE work that was on their roadmap because of the way AI is changing software engineering

- They made sure to include a special section for investors

Seems to me they should have made the org changes in an unrelated announcement, and celebrated the opportunity for new work and the possible hiring that might be required to accomplish it all.

Like, GitLab is in an incredible position to moonshot the next generation of software. AI needs new substrate to work most effectively, and GitLab is the most popular "alternative" substrate to the fragile dinosaur that Github has become.

But AI needs to be seen as cutting costs above all else, so they can sell more of it everywhere, and this is what we get.