The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source · Changelog Media

From GitLab to Kilo Code (Interview)

January 7, 2026·1 hr 17 min·6 clips

Sid Sabrandage discovered a six-centimeter tumor in his spine and underwent emergency spinal fusion surgery.

Sid Sabrandage returns with a story that does not sit neatly in one lane. The conversation begins with his late 2022 bone cancer diagnosis, then moves through work, family, treatment, travel, and the kind of founder pace that sounds hard to believe until he starts laying it out. Jared brings in Sid's GitLab history, including the all-in-one coding platform and IPO, but the episode spends more time on what life looks like now. Right now, that means meetings. A lot of them. Sid says the recent stretch has included 10-hour days, full days of meetings, and about 15 short meetings in a day. That would be a lot even without medical travel in the background. Then he adds the part that makes the whole thing land differently: at one point, they thought this might be his last year. So he and his wife celebrated their 25-year anniversary hard, with friends and family, while treatment and conferences took them across multiple continents. Work still has a way of pulling him in. Sid talks about adding observability to GitLab, starting an AI coding company called KiloCode, and using Open Core Ventures to build companies around open source projects. By December, he says he had started 30 companies over the last three or four years. Since September, he says he has also been starting two biotechs every month. It is a strange mix: urgent, practical, and a little absurd in scale. The agentic coding thread is the reason he is here now. With medical companies, treatments, and travel already moving, why spend energy on open source agentic coding? Sid's answer is plain. He saw open source agentic coding companies rising, which changed his fear that the whole category would end up closed source. KiloCode is the bet: an all-in-one agentic engineering platform, built from the same open source instinct and all-in-one playbook that shaped GitLab. The episode closes warmly, with the hosts thanking Sid for the time and easing back into the show's usual listener housekeeping.

As heard by us

A candid Sid Sabrandage interview connects GitLab, illness, open source, and Kilo Code without turning any one thread into the whole story.

Sid Sabrandage's return to The Changelog is less a standard founder interview than a frank check-in with someone still building while living through bone cancer.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want a founder story with real stakes: GitLab's path to IPO, a bone cancer diagnosis, and Sid Sabrandage building KiloCode while still chasing open source bets.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source