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Comment by john_cogs | Hacker News Reader

GitLab team member here.

This work was produced by our AI Assist SEG (Single-Engineer Group)[0]. The engineer behind this feature recently uploaded a quick update about this work and other things they are working on to YouTube[1].

[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/ai-...

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYl0dg8xyeE

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Why do you call this a group? Why don't you say "one of our engineers did this"? I read the linked article [1] and that seems to be the accurate situation: not a group of people including one engineer, not one engineer at a time on a rotation, but literally one person. In what way is that a group?

[1]: https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#single-engi...

Great question. I'm not entirely clear on the origin of the name and it would probably be hard for me to find the folks behind this decision on Friday evening/Saturday so I'll share my interpretation.

At GitLab, we have a clearly defined organizational structure. Within that stucture, we have Product Groups[0] which are groups of people aligned around a specific category. The name "Single-Engineer Groups" reflects that this single engineer owns the category which they're focusing on.

I'll be sure to surface your question to the leader of our Incubation Engineering org. Thanks.

[0] - https://about.gitlab.com/company/team/structure/#product-gro...

I imagine it's similar to working groups [0], but keeping the term the same when only one person is in the working group, hence single engineer (working) group. Basically, parse `group` as in `working group` as a single term of art, rather than literally meaning a colloquial group, ie 2 or more individuals.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Working_group

It is different since working groups are not full time roles.

I have nothing against a working group that happens to be one person at the moment, but this SEG is defined by being a single person. It would cease being a SEG if it got more members. Hence don't call it a group...

jesus christ john, i cant wrap my head around the concept of single-person group!! haha

Gitlab is 600Kloc of JS and 1.8Mloc of Ruby. Of course a SEG would make sense to them.

OpenAPI, tests, and {Ruby on Rails w/ Script.aculo.us built-in back in the day, JS, and rewrite in {Rust, Go,}}? There's dokku-scheduler-kubernetes; and Gitea, a fork of Gogs, which is a github clone in Go; but Gitea doesn't do inbound email to Issues, Service Desk Issues, or (Drone,) CI with deploy to k8s revid.staging and production DNS domains w/ Ingress.

If it makes it easier, our title is Incubation Engineering, because it reflects better what we do: finding new areas to explore and kickstart, searching for new markets, or how to expand existing markets. We need to choose initiatives within our scope (mine is MLOps) that fit the scope of a person in a short period of time, and test the idea by putting stuff in production. Ideas that are too uncertain or risky to dedicate a full team on, but would make sense for a single person initially.

Other recent outputs of the team are CloudSeed[0], improved GitLab pages setup [1] and Code Reviews for Jupyter Notebooks [2]

- [0] CloudSeed https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/clo... - [1] https://about.gitlab.com/releases/2022/09/22/gitlab-15-4-rel... - [2] https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/user/project/repository/jupyter_n...

> single engineer group

oxymoron

The definitions I see for group all use "a number",e.g. "a number of people or things that are located, gathered, or classed together". So if you're willing to accept 1 as a possible value for a number, it's not an oxymoron.

Is 0 people a group by the unusual definition you use?

It is, at least in principle. As I see it, there's nothing that immediately discontinues a group when the last person leaves; it only makes it inactive. But a group could also become inactive in many other ways (e.g. deciding not to meet for a long time). It's only if whatever organization that found a benefit at having that group, no longer does and decides to discontinue it, then it stops being a group.

What a weird world you live in. What about "the organization"? What if it has 0 people?

The world I live in is one which accepts both usual and unusual circumstances.

In the extreme case, consider a small company whose few owners and employees suddenly pass away (e.g. in a plane crash). The fact that the company suddenly has 0 employees and even 0 shareholders does not immediately terminate the company. It still continues to exist as a business and legal entity, until the government / lawyers either find new shareholders (typically heirs) who are willing to run the company, or appoint a director to initiate foreclosure.

1+1=1

0 × 0 = 0

A single item list is still a list.

John nailed it. A single engineer group is something being explored by one person, but could eventually represent a "product group" in the future. See https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#single-engineer-groups for more things that could be explored by such a person.

If you think there is a better name to capture that I'm sure it would be considered.

Tiger (team)

I’m always suspicious of “one engineer did this” projects. There are probably quite a few engineers, product people and other employees who are simply unattributed for this.

Well, the guy that wrote this fibonacci function that the model reproduced verbatim from some "learn to program" site sure went unattributed. That's AI for you.

To try it out, I wrote a Hello World function, and it literally named the tutorial it was taken from. (ie: Hello, Tutorialname!) So it definitely happens often enough, although usually it is probably harder to tell when straight up plagiarism has occurred.

Well, on the FauxPilot side I did do the initial implementation personally (over the course of a few weeks this summer) – but of course I'm building on the work the Salesforce team put into training the CodeGen models, and the work NVIDIA did in creating the FasterTransformer inference library and Triton inference server that FauxPilot uses.

I don't know how things are organized within GitLab, but it's pretty plausible to me that one engineer could put together the completion portion of the VSCode extension – you can see the code here: https://gitlab.com/gitlab-org/gitlab-vscode-extension/-/blob...

Fred has also been providing pull requests to improve FauxPilot, which I very much appreciate! :)

Another SEG here (our title is Incubation Engineer now, my area is MLOps). It is true that we build on top of what others did. What we mean by single engineer group is that is a one-person-team: we are responsible from the end-to-end project, from defining the vision, to talking to customers, to implementing the solution, and delivering a product. This is a relative new team (a bit more that one year). https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/engineering/incubation/

Classic off by one error.

"one of our engineers did this" isn't a technical sounding acronym.

Does it have to be an acronym? You could totally say "Fred de Gier at GitLab is working on this".

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