Simon Willison's Weblog: 37signals

Thoughts on GitLab's workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions"

2026-05-11T23:58:55+00:00

There's a lot going on in this announcement from GitLab about the "workforce reduction" and "structural and strategic decisions" they are making with respect to the agentic era.

They're "planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams". One of the most interesting things about GitLab is that they have employees spread across a large number of countries - 18 are listed in their public employee handbook but this post says they are "operating in nearly 60 countries". That handbook used to document their payroll workflows for those countries too - they stopped publishing that in 2023 but the last public version (hooray for version control) remains a fascinating read. Since we don't know which of those 60 countries have small teams, we can't calculate how many countries that 30% applies to.
"We're planning to flatten the organization, removing up to three layers of management in some functions so leaders are closer to the work." - this isn't the first announcement of this type I've seen that's trimming management. Coinbase recently announced a much more aggressive version of this: they were "flattening our org structure to 5 layers max below" and "No pure managers: Every leader at Coinbase must also be a strong and active individual contributor. Managers should be like player-coaches".
In terms of team structure: "We're re-organizing R&D to create roughly 60 smaller, more empowered teams with end-to-end ownership, nearly doubling the number of independent teams." I've always loved the idea of individual teams that can ship features unblocked by other teams, and it makes sense to me that agentic engineering can increase the capability of such teams. The 37signals public employee handbook used to have a section on working In self-sufficient, independent teams which perfectly captured this for me, I'm sad to see they removed that detail in January 2024!
Tucked away towards the bottom: "We will be retiring CREDIT as our values framework" - that's the values framework described on this page: "Collaboration, Results for Customers, Efficiency, Diversity, Inclusion & Belonging, Iteration, and Transparency". The new values are "Speed with Quality, Ownership Mindset, Customer Outcomes". The fact that "Diversity" is no longer in there is likely to attract a whole lot of attention, so it's worth noting that a sub-bullet under Customer Outcomes reads "Interpersonal excellence: individuals who are good humans, embrace diversity, inclusion and belonging, assume good intent and treat everyone with respect".

Here's the part of their new strategy that most resonated with me:

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.

That very much encapsulates my own optimistic, Jevons-paradox-inspired hope for how this will all work out.

Their opinion on this does need to be taken with a big grain of salt though. GitLab's stock price was ~$52 a year ago and is ~$26 today, and it's plausible that the drop corresponds to uncertainty about GitLab's continued growth as agentic engineering eats its way through their core market.

If your entire business depends on software engineering growing as a field and producing larger volumes of more lucrative seats, you have a strong incentive to believe that agents will have that effect!

Via Hacker News

Tags: 37signals, careers, ai, gitlab, coding-agents, jevons-paradox, agentic-engineering

Quoting Jeremy Daer

2026-01-17T17:06:41+00:00

[On agents using CLI tools in place of REST APIs] To save on context window, yes, but moreso to improve accuracy and success rate when multiple tool calls are involved, particularly when calls must be correctly chained e.g. for pagination, rate-limit backoff, and recognizing authentication failures.

Other major factor: which models can wield the skill? Using the CLI lowers the bar so cheap, fast models (gpt-5-nano, haiku-4.5) can reliably succeed. Using the raw APl is something only the costly "strong" models (gpt-5.2, opus-4.5) can manage, and it squeezes a ton of thinking/reasoning out of them, which means multiple turns/iterations, which means accumulating a ton of context, which means burning loads of expensive tokens. For one-off API requests and ad hoc usage driven by a developer, this is reasonable and even helpful, but for an autonomous agent doing repetitive work, it's a disaster.

— Jeremy Daer, 37signals

Tags: 37signals, ai, prompt-engineering, generative-ai, llms, skills

What's New in Ruby on Rails 8

2024-10-07T19:17:47+00:00

What's New in Ruby on Rails 8

Rails 8 takes SQLite from a lightweight development tool to a reliable choice for production use, thanks to extensive work on the SQLite adapter and Ruby driver.

With the introduction of the solid adapters discussed above, SQLite now has the capability to power Action Cable, Rails.cache, and Active Job effectively, expanding its role beyond just prototyping or testing environments. [...]

Transactions default to IMMEDIATE mode to improve concurrency.

Also included in Rails 8: Kamal, a new automated deployment system by 37signals for self-hosting web applications on hardware or virtual servers:

Kamal basically is Capistrano for Containers, without the need to carefully prepare servers in advance. No need to ensure that the servers have just the right version of Ruby or other dependencies you need. That all lives in the Docker image now. You can boot a brand new Ubuntu (or whatever) server, add it to the list of servers in Kamal, and it’ll be auto-provisioned with Docker, and run right away.

At 37signals, we're building a growing suite of apps that use SQLite in production with ONCE. There are now thousands of installations of both Campfire and Writebook running in the wild that all run SQLite. This has meant a lot of real-world pressure on ensuring that Rails (and Ruby) is working that wonderful file-based database as well as it can be. Through proper defaults like WAL and IMMEDIATE mode. Special thanks to Stephen Margheim for a slew of such improvements and Mike Dalessio for solving a last-minute SQLite file corruption issue in the Ruby driver.

Via Hacker News

Tags: 37signals, rails, ruby, sqlite, docker, sqlite-busy

MRSK

2023-04-29T23:54:40+00:00

MRSK

A new open source web application deployment tool from 37signals, developed to help migrate their Hey webmail app out of the cloud and onto their own managed hardware. The key feature is one that I care about deeply: it enables zero-downtime deploys by running all traffic through a Traefik reverse proxy in a way that allows requests to be paused while a new deployment is going out—so end users get a few seconds delay on their HTTP requests before being served by the replaced application.

Tags: 37signals, deployment, ops, zero-downtime, traefik

What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic?

2013-10-21T11:08:00+00:00

My answer to What are prominent examples for remote work besides 37Signals, Github and Automattic? on Quora

Canonical (the company behind Ubuntu) have a very impressive distributed team culture.

Tags: 37signals, github, wordpress, quora

What are some early examples of SaaS?

2013-09-30T09:58:00+00:00

My answer to What are some early examples of SaaS? on Quora

37 Signals' Basecamp was one of the pioneers if modern SaaS back in 2004.

Tags: 37signals, enterprise, entrepreneurship, startups, quora, saas

37signals Product Blog: We'll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1

2011-01-25T16:17:00+00:00

37signals Product Blog: We'll be retiring our support of OpenID on May 1

The support costs far outweighed the benefits to customers, especially now that 37signals have their own single sign in mechanism that works across all of their products.

Tags: 37signals, openid, recovered

Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008

2008-07-04T09:17:53+00:00

Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008

Interesting move considering BaseCamp is used for communicating with (often corporate) clients. It would be nice to see the browser stats behind the decision.

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, browsersupport, ie6

BUG: XSS Security flaw in BaseCamp Messages

2008-06-26T09:39:20+00:00

BUG: XSS Security flaw in BaseCamp Messages

BaseCamp lets users include HTML and JavaScript in messages, on the basis that anyone with a BaseCamp account is a trusted party. I’m not convinced: you could use this to circumvent BaseCamp’s access control stuff and read messages you’re not meant to. On the flip side, you could also use this to add brand new features to BaseCamp by using JavaScript in a message as a server-side equivalent to Greasemonkey.

Via Hacker News

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, greasemonkey, javascript, security, xss

How not to apply for a job

2008-06-17T08:22:44+00:00

How not to apply for a job

Quite reasonably, 37signals care if job applicants get their wordmark right. Having worked for Yahoo! I know how important that ! is. What really winds me up is companies that aren’t consistent with name capitalisation across their own sites—many startups are guilty of this.

Tags: 37signals, jobs, spelling, wordmark, yahoo

OpenID support in Blinksale

2007-07-10T07:45:44+00:00

OpenID support in Blinksale

Blinksale + Highrise + Basecamp means you can run your small business on OpenID.

Via Chris Messina

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, blinksale, chris-messina, highrise, openid

OpenID: Why, how, 37signals

2007-06-28T01:38:22+00:00

OpenID: Why, how, 37signals

37signals just enabled OpenID on Basecamp as well as Highrise. This is their excellent attempt at explaining its benefits.

Tags: 37signals, basecamp, highrise, openid

Highrise: Early stats, Cases for all, the new Solo plan, and more disk space!

2007-03-23T01:44:09+00:00

Highrise: Early stats, Cases for all, the new Solo plan, and more disk space!

9% of signups came in through OpenID, and they’ve opened up cases to everyone fixing my number one complaint about the service. Great job!

Tags: 37signals, highise, openid

Highrise

2007-03-19T22:39:05+00:00

Highrise

The new online contact manager from 37signals—exactly the tool I need for managing my freelancing, and it even accepts OpenID.

Tags: 37signals, highrise, openid

37 Signals' next app Highrise will support OpenID

2007-03-07T09:23:20+00:00

37 Signals' next app Highrise will support OpenID

I can’t wait to see how the 37 Signals team deal with the UI challenges involved in supporting OpenID logins.

Tags: 37signals, highrise, openid

AOL Retention Manual Revealed - 37 signals take note

2006-07-19T08:01:18+00:00

AOL Retention Manual Revealed - 37 signals take note

That’s why AOL developed, “Keep It Real”...a set of principles that will drive a world-class Member experience...

Tags: 37signals

punupgeek.com on Active Resource

2006-06-26T11:12:05+00:00

punupgeek.com on Active Resource

Looks like 37 signals might be looking in to scaling across multiple servers using web services.

Tags: 37signals, activeresource, rails, scaling

"The Building of Basecamp" Review

2004-07-07T08:34:25+00:00

"The Building of Basecamp" Review

Includes insights in to 37 Signals’ process.

Tags: 37signals

Basecamp

2004-02-06T03:11:39+00:00

Basecamp

New hosted project management solution from 37signals

Tags: 37signals

Open source web editing

2002-11-13T22:24:05+00:00

While reading the thread discussing Macromedia's Contribute over on 37signals I realised something: the web could really do with an open source Contribute style application. Editing full documents is best done in an application - there's only so much you can do with browser based editing tools (even if you take advantage of IE's contendEditable or use Flash to build an editor applet). When people are using Word they hit Ctrl+S to instantly save what they working on - show me a browser based editor with the same functionality.

Then it hit me. The open source community already has the beginnings of a desktop WYSIWYG content editing application in Mozilla's Composer. Composer is often overlooked, but the few times I have tried it it has proved to be a remarkably powerful piece of software. Imagine an open source project inspired by Contribute, based on Composer but with support for XML-RPC and SOAP in addition to FTP (the Mozilla code base has libraries for all 3). CMS vendors could use it to build powerful, cross-platform editing applications for their existing systems, bloggers could use it to update their blogs (through support for something like the MetaWeblog API, schools and colleges could use the FTP version to encourage non technical users to update sites simply (as Contribute does now).

Now if only I knew XUL...

Update: Whaddya know, there's even a document on embedding the editor right there on the Composer site.

Tags: 37signals

Less is more

2002-07-14T03:13:33+00:00

The Minimalist Web Project is a collection of good looking web sites adhering to the minimalist style, based on the idea that "less is more". Some beautiful sites are listed, including 37signals' brand new CSS/XHTML design.

Tags: 37signals