The GitLab founder forks again

gm legends, happy Tuesday.

Sid Sijbrandij — who ran GitLab — forked a coding agent and now has 2M users; ex-UiPath founders who left to fix the part UiPath never solved; Valve shipped new controller hardware; and The Pitch by Deel hits New York today.

Kilo Code is an open-source AI coding agent for VS Code and JetBrains, co-founded by Sid Sijbrandij — who scaled GitLab to a public listing — launched as a fork of Roo Code and now at 2M users with parallel agents and multi-model comparisons across 500+ models in version 7.

🔥 Our Take: GitLab's playbook was: find a proprietary tool developers tolerate but don't trust, build the open alternative, and wait. The 2M users and 25 trillion tokens processed suggest that's working here too. Parallel agents and multi-model comparisons are v7's pitch to the power users who've outgrown single-model, single-thread setups.

The Pitch by Deel hits New York today — the sixth stop of a $15M global startup competition where regional finalists pitch live for a $50,000 SAFE investment. The top 10 across all regions advance to the Global Finale for a shot at $1M. The Product Hunt leaderboard is how the community shows up: the competing startups are live today, and votes here count.

Three more regional stops to go: Tel Aviv on May 7, Singapore on May 12, and Dubai on May 14. The Global Finale is May 18–19.

Scroll today's leaderboard and back the ones worth backing.

Intuned Agent is a code-first browser automation platform from ex-UiPath founders that converts natural language into production Playwright code — and when a target site changes and the automation breaks, a Claude-powered agent reads the failure trace and ships the fix itself.

🔥 Our Take: The reason most browser automation projects die isn't the initial build — it's the third time a target site redesigns and the engineer who wrote the scraper has moved on. The ex-UiPath founders know that story: maintenance cost was what killed enterprise RPA adoption too. An agent that closes that loop is the specific bet that changes the calculus.

Steam Controller is Valve's return to dedicated controller hardware — seven years after the original was discontinued in 2019 — built around the Steam Input software system that's been running quietly on PC gaming setups ever since.

🔥 Our Take: The original Steam Controller failed partly because it asked users to configure everything from scratch. Building this one around Steam Input — which already has years of community profiles and presets behind it — is the lesson learned. Niche, but the right kind of niche.