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135 comments
Good stuff, like the AI approach to this.
On Jira, I keep hearing the criticism of Jira on this forum a lot, but IMO it's not that bad product. Jira is used by all industries, not just by software management. Making a tool has to be a "silver bullet" for managing any kind of project is not easy. Tell me a better PM tool which is as widely used as Jira.
On Jira, I keep hearing the criticism of Jira on this forum a lot, but IMO it's not that bad product. Jira is used by all industries, not just by software management. Making a tool has to be a "silver bullet" for managing any kind of project is not easy. Tell me a better PM tool which is as widely used as Jira.
I appreciate that what Jira is trying to do is hard. That might mean that it's trying to do too much and the industry would be better picking a different set of tools that don't try to do as much.
However, the biggest problem is one of misaligned incentives. Jira is meant to make a director's job easier at the expense of everyone else. It's a bit like Coupa: Coupa nearly requires an administrator, and increases the cognitive load of everyone in the org, but it makes the job of the accountants so much easier that people live with it.
(That said, I will be interested in how AI and Atlassian end up interacting. We all know it's coming.)
However, the biggest problem is one of misaligned incentives. Jira is meant to make a director's job easier at the expense of everyone else. It's a bit like Coupa: Coupa nearly requires an administrator, and increases the cognitive load of everyone in the org, but it makes the job of the accountants so much easier that people live with it.
(That said, I will be interested in how AI and Atlassian end up interacting. We all know it's coming.)
I think a lot of the criticism of jira really boils down to bad practices and being a bit careless with it.
However, jira’s performance when it comes to load times, query times, opening and updating tickets, etc. truly does warrant criticism. It introduces a substantial amount of friction when trying to manage multiple tickets, or just get things done.
However, jira’s performance when it comes to load times, query times, opening and updating tickets, etc. truly does warrant criticism. It introduces a substantial amount of friction when trying to manage multiple tickets, or just get things done.
It's been over 10 years since I last used Jira, but I still miss a lot of it. Where I saw it become a problem was that over time it accumulated layers and layers of people messing with it, especially as the company went through a phase of hiring project managers with a need to mark their territory by changing all of the workflows. What started out as a relatively lightweight tool used by the engineers to organize their work became a convoluted mess.
To be fair, that's not unique to Jira, and I certainly can't say I haven't put my own fingers in that pie.
To be fair, that's not unique to Jira, and I certainly can't say I haven't put my own fingers in that pie.
Want to middle click this one specific link to open it in a background tab? Instead of respecting default browser behavior the user is expecting, JIRA happily hijacks the mouse down event to open your background link in the foreground instead, which prevents you from opening multiple links in a convenient timely manor.
A deployment happened on December 29th. It's January 2th. Suddenly, you need to know if the deployment happened 1 week ago or 1 month ago. You remember the deployments page usually says useful information such as X days ago or X weeks ago. Based on the facts, a rational normal person is expecting something like 4 days ago. JIRA says "last year".
A deployment happened on December 29th. It's January 2th. Suddenly, you need to know if the deployment happened 1 week ago or 1 month ago. You remember the deployments page usually says useful information such as X days ago or X weeks ago. Based on the facts, a rational normal person is expecting something like 4 days ago. JIRA says "last year".
Didn't they have an outage where they lost a lot of data for many companies a while back, or at least took months to get back?
We agree to it that JIRA is an elephant. It's also not gonna be an easy journey for us and we are all in for the long journey.
Great on work creating an alternative to Linear which is a carbon copy of Linear [1].
Linear also been powered by local first sync since 2019, we have AI features shipped and in the pipeline.
As YC alumni/design founder of Linear disappointed to see that design/ui/product is treated this way and something to completely rip off from other products.
Last 5 years we’ve been iterating on the Linear design and product. We are still a small team. We also like to share how we build and design to improve inspire others.
But this is no inspiration or inspiring.
Just some days ago Garry Tan was talking about how to get founders learn and value design and this is the opposite of that.
[1] https://linear.app
Linear also been powered by local first sync since 2019, we have AI features shipped and in the pipeline.
As YC alumni/design founder of Linear disappointed to see that design/ui/product is treated this way and something to completely rip off from other products.
Last 5 years we’ve been iterating on the Linear design and product. We are still a small team. We also like to share how we build and design to improve inspire others.
But this is no inspiration or inspiring.
Just some days ago Garry Tan was talking about how to get founders learn and value design and this is the opposite of that.
[1] https://linear.app
100%, flashed back the Garry Tan tweet too. This project would be great as an open source tech demo, but was quite surprised to see the YC logo on here.
(as a founder) I expect YC to understand the importance of iterative design and not throw money out of the window for a snapshot.
(as a founder) I expect YC to understand the importance of iterative design and not throw money out of the window for a snapshot.
Hey Karri, I’m truly sorry for how things have turned out. Our aim was to highlight the importance of design, regardless of the project’s size. We never intended to copy Linear, but rather to consider it as an inspiration for any upcoming tools in this field, emphasizing the need for good design.
Rest assured, we will focus our efforts on these aspects and make sure to rectify the situation.
Rest assured, we will focus our efforts on these aspects and make sure to rectify the situation.
Yeah this is really frustrating to see Karri. You guys have built an amazing tool at Linear. I truly believe it has inspired everyone in the tech world who wants to build better software.
For this team to fully clone it, open-source it and then claim they were inspired by Linear is incredibly dishonest.
I know you already know this, what you all have built at Linear is a gold standard and the replicas wont be able to keep up.
For this team to fully clone it, open-source it and then claim they were inspired by Linear is incredibly dishonest.
I know you already know this, what you all have built at Linear is a gold standard and the replicas wont be able to keep up.
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> Bug Agent, upon bug assignment, will attempt to reproduce the bug, propose solutions, and in some cases, even implement these solutions in a new PR.
How does this work?
How does this work?
AI for project management is an amazing use case.
May I suggest adding features:
1. Expanding on the description taking the project meta info or history into account. 2. Adding to the above, come up with feature scenarios and test cases 3. An agent to listen into standup conversations to come up with an updated priority list for PO to approve? 4. Move tickets or suggestions to move tickets to next stage of workflows depending on the state of the ticket? 5. Optimising workflows and suggesting better workflows listening into stand ups, retros etc. 6. Come up with demo list of tickets for team to demo 7. Prefill or suggest topics for retros 8. Come with timeline suggestions depending on history and evaluating the code and designs 9. More on code, come up with architecture diagrams (puml etc) and API contracts dependant on code, tickets and conversations 10. Come up with sub tasks/suggestions after evaluating the description and code base.
1. Expanding on the description taking the project meta info or history into account. 2. Adding to the above, come up with feature scenarios and test cases 3. An agent to listen into standup conversations to come up with an updated priority list for PO to approve? 4. Move tickets or suggestions to move tickets to next stage of workflows depending on the state of the ticket? 5. Optimising workflows and suggesting better workflows listening into stand ups, retros etc. 6. Come up with demo list of tickets for team to demo 7. Prefill or suggest topics for retros 8. Come with timeline suggestions depending on history and evaluating the code and designs 9. More on code, come up with architecture diagrams (puml etc) and API contracts dependant on code, tickets and conversations 10. Come up with sub tasks/suggestions after evaluating the description and code base.
thanks a lot. We will add these to our idea board, definitely a lot more work to do and things to build
Love the standup and other ideas here and happy to see a smarter alternative coming up to take on Atlassian and Jira.
Atlassian recently bought Loom and is clearly working to incorporate multimodal video/screen share input through Loom into Jira. We have a smarter Loom alternative (https://augmend.com) that is partially (scrensharing rust core) open sourced and we’d love to help you 1) not use your competitor’s product :), and 2) get you ahead of the Loom/Jira integrations and “better together” developments that are progressing now. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
Atlassian recently bought Loom and is clearly working to incorporate multimodal video/screen share input through Loom into Jira. We have a smarter Loom alternative (https://augmend.com) that is partially (scrensharing rust core) open sourced and we’d love to help you 1) not use your competitor’s product :), and 2) get you ahead of the Loom/Jira integrations and “better together” developments that are progressing now. https://www.atlassian.com/blog/announcements/atlassian-acqui...
One of the things I’m doing at work is working on an agent that checks the documentation against the ticket and attempts to confirm the spec in the ticket is correct. Another flow is to also check the ticket and check if a “rational” software engineer had enough information to make an informed decision to complete the task. If not, provide suggestions as a comment on how to improve the ticket.
I'm more curious about how you've implemented this.
I'd love a local-first software that stores issue data on Git itself. Does something like that exist? Kind of like Fossil's ticket management, but based on Git.
I think git-bug[1] is the most popular project of that sort.
[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
[1]: https://github.com/MichaelMure/git-bug
Very curious, in our understanding we thought the companies don't really have the time to spend their engineering bandwidth on project management. How do you think providing such an architecture can help?
What a great idea. Would love to see a project having a repo with separate src, docs, tickets folder, with infra having the ui to manage the non code contents.
I’d hate having 30 edits to a ticket description polluting my git log.
tags and filtering
> We load all the data from local (indexed db),
Ymmv with that. I've written a webnovel reader for myself before (never published it because of the obvious copyright issue of scraping the content)
My first approach was a Django SSR app, and it worked great for years. Since then I've remade it several times in various languages, attempting to get the smallest latency possible vs the developer experience.
In my testing, web requests were ultimately faster then indexeddb if the query was essentially pre-computed / simple select (i.e. persisting count attributes with via insert trigger etc). My currently deployed version is java, and it's only role is to extract the userId from the jwt and feed the request params into the query, which is serialized to json by the DB, so the java application simply returns the data as string while setting the application/json media type.
I got full page load (pwa, so cached html/Js) to 8-15ms with that approach, querying the data from indexeddb took upwards from 25ms on all of my attempts, usually 50+ms as the amount of data increased later on
Ymmv with that. I've written a webnovel reader for myself before (never published it because of the obvious copyright issue of scraping the content)
My first approach was a Django SSR app, and it worked great for years. Since then I've remade it several times in various languages, attempting to get the smallest latency possible vs the developer experience.
In my testing, web requests were ultimately faster then indexeddb if the query was essentially pre-computed / simple select (i.e. persisting count attributes with via insert trigger etc). My currently deployed version is java, and it's only role is to extract the userId from the jwt and feed the request params into the query, which is serialized to json by the DB, so the java application simply returns the data as string while setting the application/json media type.
I got full page load (pwa, so cached html/Js) to 8-15ms with that approach, querying the data from indexeddb took upwards from 25ms on all of my attempts, usually 50+ms as the amount of data increased later on
We also have tried initially to build an SSR and get data from the server but when in the process we figured every time making an API call was slowing things down and adding up a lot of latency even if start adding complicated algorithms to the API call caching.
We think indexeddb also evolved in the recent years, but we will definitely keep an eye and keep improving with the available technologies.
We think indexeddb also evolved in the recent years, but we will definitely keep an eye and keep improving with the available technologies.
Congrats on launch! It’s inspiring to see you building in the open.
Why build Nest on the server when you already have Next for the client?
Why build Nest on the server when you already have Next for the client?
In order to ensure everything is fast and real-time, we built a sync engine that runs in the background. We also use queues to perform some actions asynchronously. These factors influenced our decision to proceed with a server and scale as necessary.
We were comfortable with this architecture, having used it in our previous apps. This setup also offered us the flexibility to work quickly, as I focused on the frontend while my co-founder handled all backend tasks.
We were comfortable with this architecture, having used it in our previous apps. This setup also offered us the flexibility to work quickly, as I focused on the frontend while my co-founder handled all backend tasks.
Makes sense.
Congrats on the launch! We'd be in business for an alternative and I also thought about building something on my own. What I'm missing would be project-specific workflows (i.e. coding tasks have QA stages at our company) and higher flight levels like initiatives to sync product management, design and engineering.
Do you have a roadmap?
Do you have a roadmap?
Our documentation is a work in progress, with our roadmap soon to be posted there.
We refer to the stages as workflows (To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done, etc.). Currently, we are focusing on the engineering teams and have predefined workflows. However, we plan to launch team-based workflow customization soon.
Regarding initiatives, we are working on a module that will provide a combined view of teams (such as Product, Design, etc.). This initiative module, for example, “Integrations,” will cut across these teams for better tracking.
We refer to the stages as workflows (To Do, In Progress, In Review, Done, etc.). Currently, we are focusing on the engineering teams and have predefined workflows. However, we plan to launch team-based workflow customization soon.
Regarding initiatives, we are working on a module that will provide a combined view of teams (such as Product, Design, etc.). This initiative module, for example, “Integrations,” will cut across these teams for better tracking.
We are working on this exact thing, would love to give you a demo and early access. My email is in profile.
Congrats on the launch , we are also working on something similar but didn't had enough time due to being busy with client projects.
https://github.com/Sprint-Log
But we will focus fully on opensource there , no external API calls.
But we will focus fully on opensource there , no external API calls.
What's the business plan, being open source, since you've taken funding? Do you pledge to stay open source? Linear already syncs with Slack and GitHub, and your UI is clearly inspired by it, so what would you say is your biggest differentiator? I hope this does not come across as overly harsh.
Yes, we pledge to remain open source.
1. Our design is inspired by the linear UI, which we believe is the best. We didn't want to reinvent this aspect.
2. As for our differentiation, we've been building the system for two months and believe none of the existing systems prioritize AI. We're focusing on deploying AI agents in specific use cases such as:
1. Our design is inspired by the linear UI, which we believe is the best. We didn't want to reinvent this aspect.
2. As for our differentiation, we've been building the system for two months and believe none of the existing systems prioritize AI. We're focusing on deploying AI agents in specific use cases such as:
1. Task prioritization
2. Feedback management
3. Bug resolution
Once you become popular what stops amazon etc from simply implementing your open source software themselves and charging businesss. We’ve seen it time and again, perhaps most famously with elasticsearch.
Indeed, I experienced this at Airbyte when Amazon began to charge for implementing Airbyte on their platform. In response, Airbyte took proactive steps such as bolstering the community and modifying the license terms to prevent this.
Additionally, there's a certain inertia involved in applying for all integrations. These, however, will come pre-packaged in our cloud-hosted solutions via OAuth's.
As this is a recurring issue, we plan to engage with the community for ideas on how to effectively address it.
Additionally, there's a certain inertia involved in applying for all integrations. These, however, will come pre-packaged in our cloud-hosted solutions via OAuth's.
As this is a recurring issue, we plan to engage with the community for ideas on how to effectively address it.
It looks nice. AI for project management is a good use case. As a long time open source contributor and sysadmin, I think it is very important to have a way to self host without docker, with a list of requirements. I recently wanted to try plane, but it requires docker, so I kept using gitea issues for now.
Isn't a dockerfile exactly a list of requirements to run it?
Check out the compose for the required services https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/main/docker-compose.ya...
And the server dockerfile for build + run instructions (it's literally just yarn build && yarn start:prod) https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/main/server/Dockerfile...
Check out the compose for the required services https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/main/docker-compose.ya...
And the server dockerfile for build + run instructions (it's literally just yarn build && yarn start:prod) https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/main/server/Dockerfile...
It's better, you know it's actually correct/works! (Or higher chance, or you'll see somewhere that it is or is not working, etc.)
What’s stopping you from following the steps in the Dockerfile if you wanted to run it directly?
You could probably feed the Dockerfile into a LLM and ask it to create a list of instructions for a human to follow.
Congrats on your launch.
JIRA is a pretty large system that does a lot.
Has there been any thought about assisting transitions to happen faster by being able to partially use JIRA as a backend VIA api, and migrate the data?
JIRA is a pretty large system that does a lot.
Has there been any thought about assisting transitions to happen faster by being able to partially use JIRA as a backend VIA api, and migrate the data?
We've already transitioned few private beta customers from JIRA using a backend script. Although we haven't addressed all edge cases yet, we anticipate that this script will evolve over time. Once we've covered a sufficient number of scenarios, we plan to integrate this option into the UI.
We also plan to build an integration with JIRA where you can still use JIRA and link the issues in Tegon as you slowly migrate to our product. Similar to Github issues which is already live.
I've never successfully gotten a company to move off of Jira. Frustrating.
We have companies moving to Linear daily, so it’s possible.
And these can be anything from a 10 person company to 2000+ person companies.
We have jira sync that helps with transition. https://linear.app/integrations/jira
And these can be anything from a 10 person company to 2000+ person companies.
We have jira sync that helps with transition. https://linear.app/integrations/jira
My company did. We moved to ClickUp. It is much better
We also migrated to ClickUp (though not from Jira) but while it's better than what we used before, it still feels... I don't know, sluggish. Loaders everywhere, lists are jumping when you scroll. Sometimes I click on a task, the detail modal opens up and there is a noticable delay while the data loads. Typing a / in the description which opens up the command panel or integration panal or whatever it called, freezes everything for like 100ms or more.
Coolest thing on Show HN today :) I love that at it's heart it's just a (very nicely designed) PM tool. Would love to see LLM flows more integrated into product UX like this.
Amazing work!
Edit: Why the hell do people downvote positive comments?? What is wrong with this god awful community - this site desperately needs "Delete Account" I'm done
Amazing work!
Edit: Why the hell do people downvote positive comments?? What is wrong with this god awful community - this site desperately needs "Delete Account" I'm done
Impressive. I'd love to know why you chose to go open-source.
Thank you. We chose open source for several reasons:
1. We are building for Engineering Teams: Being in the public domain allows us to collaborate openly with engineering teams and build a better product.
2. Building Trust in AI Agents: Trust is crucial in AI development. By going open source, we demonstrate transparency and accountability, enhancing trust in our AI agents.
3. Enabling Marketplace Development: Our vision includes creating a marketplace for AI agents (Integrating with multiple tools). Open source facilitates community involvement, driving the growth of this marketplace.
4. Community: We've noticed a gap in a vocal community focused on team management and mutual support. Our aim is to create a space where individuals can come together to share knowledge and assist each other effectively.
We love opensource. We have always built in opensource.
1. We are building for Engineering Teams: Being in the public domain allows us to collaborate openly with engineering teams and build a better product.
2. Building Trust in AI Agents: Trust is crucial in AI development. By going open source, we demonstrate transparency and accountability, enhancing trust in our AI agents.
3. Enabling Marketplace Development: Our vision includes creating a marketplace for AI agents (Integrating with multiple tools). Open source facilitates community involvement, driving the growth of this marketplace.
4. Community: We've noticed a gap in a vocal community focused on team management and mutual support. Our aim is to create a space where individuals can come together to share knowledge and assist each other effectively.
We love opensource. We have always built in opensource.
To be clear, being in “the public domain” has a specific and clear definition. You’ve licensed under MIT (which is great!) but it’s not the same thing as PD or a PD-equivalent licence like CC0.
We apologize for the confusion. You are right our project is under the MIT License, allowing open use but not placing it in the public domain like CC0.
Where's the documentation?
Hey we are working on the documentation and it's almost done and should be there by EOD.
You can use this one until they have theirs up, it will be identical /s :
https://linear.app/docs
This looks about a gazillion times better than Jira even without AI. Blows my mind how awful Jira is, given it is meant to be a pro commercial product from a huge company.
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I was hoping somebody at some point would create an agent for interacting with jira so I could minimize my interaction with its horrendous UI.
Nothing fancy, just a bot that can answer questions about tickets and create and edit tickets based upon a haphazard slack conversation. It's an ideal use case for generative AI, but for some reason nobody wants to do this because they're too busy getting genai to write unit tests or cite court cases something else that is highly inappropriate.
Nothing fancy, just a bot that can answer questions about tickets and create and edit tickets based upon a haphazard slack conversation. It's an ideal use case for generative AI, but for some reason nobody wants to do this because they're too busy getting genai to write unit tests or cite court cases something else that is highly inappropriate.
I've built a PoC for semantic search and chat for Jira. Just a CLI that uses the Jira API to iterate through all tickets and uses https://github.com/philippgille/chromem-go for creating, storing and querying the embeddings. The chat doesn't work very well, but the semantic search is very useful.
I always wondered the same. Or create a plugin for Jira, that does exactly that.
Indeed, this is a very valid case. Thanks for bringing this up we shall add this to our roadmap.
Jira is extremely customisable. The "too complicated and enables a lot of processes and micro-management which used to kill our productivity" thing is a matter of management in the company, or whoever controls the implementation of project management flows, rather than Jira itself.
I'm not a fan of Jira and avoid it if I can, but it has never reduced my overall "productivity", putting some text in some forms and clicking some buttons just isn't the kind of factor with such an influence in my experience.
I'm not a fan of Jira and avoid it if I can, but it has never reduced my overall "productivity", putting some text in some forms and clicking some buttons just isn't the kind of factor with such an influence in my experience.
It's the same issue every time someone tries to brand themselves as an alternative to Jira. They implement 10/20% of the features, typically part of the task/bug-tracker and maybe the KANBAN boards and completely ignores the rest.
The fact that products and startups feel the need to brand themselves as "Jira alternatives" says a lot about the absolute dominance of Jira in some markets. You're just not going to replace Jira with a minimalist bug tracker. If profit is your goal, you'd probably be better of reimplementing your AI feature as a Jira plugin.
The fact that products and startups feel the need to brand themselves as "Jira alternatives" says a lot about the absolute dominance of Jira in some markets. You're just not going to replace Jira with a minimalist bug tracker. If profit is your goal, you'd probably be better of reimplementing your AI feature as a Jira plugin.
If there wasn’t a market for alternatives, people wouldn’t spend their time building them or marketing themselves as them.
How did you come to this conclusion?
It's very common to develop software in response to dissatisfaction with social, organisational, issues. Issues that in turn are impervious to software incentives, that is.
It's very common to develop software in response to dissatisfaction with social, organisational, issues. Issues that in turn are impervious to software incentives, that is.
I think it's not about the Jira itself, it's about who manages it and power asymmetry it creates. If a bug tracker is configured by managers it will be optimized for manager productivity at the cost of developer productivity. Same thing often happens with infra/devops.
Yeah, I mostly agree, I think it's often manager surveillance and control rather than productivity.
Can I customize it to select the epic and label on the ticket creation modal? I always have to click the link on the toast message to do these steps on a new screen, it's infuriating.
Don't have an instance available to check, sorry.
I've seen very simple setups that don't use epics and only have like three ticket types and a handful of states they can be in, like a basic kanban board, and very complex ones where several boards are interconnected and the flow is in part driven by integrations with CRM, git, CI/CD and Confluence.
Most instances I've seen have been quite badly configured in relation to how the organisation prefers to work though, people get small cuts all the time and feel like they need to fight it daily.
I've seen very simple setups that don't use epics and only have like three ticket types and a handful of states they can be in, like a basic kanban board, and very complex ones where several boards are interconnected and the flow is in part driven by integrations with CRM, git, CI/CD and Confluence.
Most instances I've seen have been quite badly configured in relation to how the organisation prefers to work though, people get small cuts all the time and feel like they need to fight it daily.
Sure, nobody cares to configure it "properly" whatever that means and I wonder if it's even possible. I'm also just an engineer in the team, I can't push through changes like this to abandon epics.
I wish we should just set Jira on fire and switch to whatever else, but it's close to impossible when you have hundreds of engineers and PM-s using it. We're stuck with it probably forever.
I wish we should just set Jira on fire and switch to whatever else, but it's close to impossible when you have hundreds of engineers and PM-s using it. We're stuck with it probably forever.
It's depressing to see how many replies here are treating the cloned design as though it's some throwaway detail, like the design is just a coat of paint on top of the code.
We (at Linear) have spent half a decade iterating to get to this point of refinement in design and UX. To have another funded startup straight up clone it is so disheartening.
We (at Linear) have spent half a decade iterating to get to this point of refinement in design and UX. To have another funded startup straight up clone it is so disheartening.
I'm personally disgusted by it and I'm not associated or even a customer/user of Linear. Also shocked by people not caring.
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> It's depressing
This may sound not-so-empathetic, but it is:
Capitalism is depressing. If we lived in a society where everyone shared and benefited together, then you wouldn't have to deal with this frustration of needing to hold onto value to ensure your survival.
This may sound not-so-empathetic, but it is:
Capitalism is depressing. If we lived in a society where everyone shared and benefited together, then you wouldn't have to deal with this frustration of needing to hold onto value to ensure your survival.
Aren't you afraid of a potential lawsuit from Linear[1]? Your interface looks like a copy paste. Dont get me wrong, it's amazing what you've build but cloning a well funded startup may not be the best strategy.
1 https://linear.app
1 https://linear.app
Indeed, our user interface (UI) shares similarities with Linear’s. We, too, are fans of Linear and appreciate its user experience (UX). After speaking with a lot of people, we concluded that it’s top-notch. Consequently, we wanted to give that experience rather than attempting to reinvent the wheel.
Despite drawing inspiration from Linear, we built everything from scratch. Our primary focus is the AI and task prioritization, which consumes most of our effort. We anticipate that our product will evolve and change over time.
Our aim was not to duplicate Linear, but to build a great product, and incorporating elements of Linear’s UX was a part of that process.
Despite drawing inspiration from Linear, we built everything from scratch. Our primary focus is the AI and task prioritization, which consumes most of our effort. We anticipate that our product will evolve and change over time.
Our aim was not to duplicate Linear, but to build a great product, and incorporating elements of Linear’s UX was a part of that process.
Your aim was to duplicate Linear because that's what you did. Shame on you. This is disgusting.
This feels disingenuous. You may have coded everything from scratch, but I couldn’t tell if this was a linear plugin or separate app from the first few seconds.
To say linear was just a source of inspiration is just not true. Call a spade a spade - linear’s ui is the best in the business so you copied it outright, down to the icons.
To say linear was just a source of inspiration is just not true. Call a spade a spade - linear’s ui is the best in the business so you copied it outright, down to the icons.
Makes sense. Sure we will start working there more.
First, congrats for the launch.
Copying the interface is not what I would call "not reinventing the wheel".
Not that you shouldn't have inspiration, but really I couldn't tell it was not linear...
Futhermore, I think it tell that your product lack AI-first design.
Copying the interface is not what I would call "not reinventing the wheel".
Not that you shouldn't have inspiration, but really I couldn't tell it was not linear...
Futhermore, I think it tell that your product lack AI-first design.
It's only been a few months into development, but yeah as our early folks started to use the product and test it out we now started to focus more there.
> Despite drawing inspiration from Linear, we built everything from scratch.
If I was to reimplement Excel from scratch but make it look like Excel, Microsoft would still sue the shit out of me.
If I was to reimplement Excel from scratch but make it look like Excel, Microsoft would still sue the shit out of me.
LibreOffice exists, doesn't it? In particular, Calc: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice_Calc
WPS Office is even more similar in some ways: https://www.wps.com/office/spreadsheet/
FreeOffice is also pretty much like Excel: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/features/freeoffice-planmaker
OfficeSuite feels like a carbon copy: https://officesuite.com/en/sheets
There's also a variety of online offerings, yet someone every single one of them isn't sued into oblivion.
Note: I can personally only endorse LibreOffice, but either way, there's many similar products and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
WPS Office is even more similar in some ways: https://www.wps.com/office/spreadsheet/
FreeOffice is also pretty much like Excel: https://www.freeoffice.com/en/features/freeoffice-planmaker
OfficeSuite feels like a carbon copy: https://officesuite.com/en/sheets
There's also a variety of online offerings, yet someone every single one of them isn't sued into oblivion.
Note: I can personally only endorse LibreOffice, but either way, there's many similar products and that's not necessarily a bad thing either.
Those are not exact copies of the interface we're discussing here. You're basically saying that all of the work on https://dribble.com/ for example, is royalty free and I can copy whatever I see there and make it my own? In what world are you living in?
Similarities in the layout, flow and overall architecture are fine, this is how you build directions in design. But you take the concept and you tweak it so that there are visible differences. Let's take Slack and Discord for example - I don't know who was first but you can see similarities, however one is not a rip off another. Same with Linear, I think it was inspired by Jira but you definitely cannot say they took it as an example.
The case discussed here is that Tegon copied Linear's interface design (colors, icons, spacings, layout, widgets, etc) almost in a pixel perfect manner, they didn't even bother with introducing their own tweaks found through user feedback. It's a copy and added >we're focusing on AI aspect and don't want to reinvent the wheel< This is not right.
Similarities in the layout, flow and overall architecture are fine, this is how you build directions in design. But you take the concept and you tweak it so that there are visible differences. Let's take Slack and Discord for example - I don't know who was first but you can see similarities, however one is not a rip off another. Same with Linear, I think it was inspired by Jira but you definitely cannot say they took it as an example.
The case discussed here is that Tegon copied Linear's interface design (colors, icons, spacings, layout, widgets, etc) almost in a pixel perfect manner, they didn't even bother with introducing their own tweaks found through user feedback. It's a copy and added >we're focusing on AI aspect and don't want to reinvent the wheel< This is not right.
We aligned considerably and drew inspiration from similar sources, including the same CSS framework style (Shadcn UI) (Opensource). However, we've made several changes based on our users' needs:
1. We determined that the "my-issues" page needed revisions, so we removed it and are currently reimagining how we can improve this feature.
2. We decided to add a company filter and are in the process of implementing it.
3. We altered some icons and other elements because they didn't align with our vision, like the "Issues" icon.
4. We also removed the title feature from the create issue workflow.
5. We are also adding the feedback module.
As you begin using the tool, you'll discover areas we're actively improving based on our ongoing conversations with customers. We've only been working for 2-3 months, but we're continuously striving to enhance the product based on the feedback we receive.
1. We determined that the "my-issues" page needed revisions, so we removed it and are currently reimagining how we can improve this feature.
2. We decided to add a company filter and are in the process of implementing it.
3. We altered some icons and other elements because they didn't align with our vision, like the "Issues" icon.
4. We also removed the title feature from the create issue workflow.
5. We are also adding the feedback module.
As you begin using the tool, you'll discover areas we're actively improving based on our ongoing conversations with customers. We've only been working for 2-3 months, but we're continuously striving to enhance the product based on the feedback we receive.
> Those are not exact copies of the interface we're discussing here.
Not my race, not my horse. However, you have to actively try to ignore the similarities (Excel vs OfficeSuite pictured here): https://imgur.com/a/q0T4uaD It's very much not a clean room design.
> You're basically saying that all of the work on https://dribble.com/ for example, is royalty free and I can copy whatever I see there and make it my own?
Royalty free? No.
Can you copy it, though? If you are in a country that doesn't care about IP or can get away with it, e.g. if what you create won't have enough visibility to get you into trouble, or you're in circumstances where prosecution is unlikely? I don't doubt that a lot of people are doing exactly that. You can probably do whatever you want as long as your risk tolerance is high enough and eventually you don't mind receiving a cease & desist in the mail.
It's much the same with the various attempts at recreating Windows/Mac UI/UX in the various *nix distros out there, or whatever the people behind Wubuntu were trying to do with a very clear financial incentive: https://youtu.be/QQD3yx-JF2E
In my eyes, it's a gray area of questionable ethics, at least in the case of copies, a bit like the various video game emulators, YouTube downloaders, fan servers for games and so on. In some cases you might end up ruining your life due to actual litigation, though. Probably not something I'd try to personally do, but common enough to raise an eyebrow, yet not spark outrage on my part.
> Let's take Slack and Discord for example - I don't know who was first but you can see similarities, however one is not a rip off another.
Is Discord and Slack similar? Not really, not that much. Slack and Mattermost or Rocket.Chat, though? They're quite alike, to the point where someone could take an issue with it, yet there's been no controversy about that: https://imgur.com/a/3n5ssQQ (random online screenshots)
Granted, they also diverge as time goes on, even if the target audience is very much the same.
> The case discussed here is that Tegon copied Linear's interface design (colors, icons, spacings, layout, widgets, etc) almost in a pixel perfect manner, they didn't even bother with introducing their own tweaks found through user feedback.
I wonder if we'll get a lot of litigation around things like that in the future, since companies really care about their branding. Back when half the web looked like Bootstrap, you didn't hear a lot about that, though. Companies most likely won't sue each other for using the same component libraries, whereas the actual UI/UX similarity is probably a scale of sorts, a wide area in the middle is probably just "doing whatever works and what people are used to".
I wonder what the closest copy to Jira is, that'd be like a speedrun at getting sued.
Not my race, not my horse. However, you have to actively try to ignore the similarities (Excel vs OfficeSuite pictured here): https://imgur.com/a/q0T4uaD It's very much not a clean room design.
> You're basically saying that all of the work on https://dribble.com/ for example, is royalty free and I can copy whatever I see there and make it my own?
Royalty free? No.
Can you copy it, though? If you are in a country that doesn't care about IP or can get away with it, e.g. if what you create won't have enough visibility to get you into trouble, or you're in circumstances where prosecution is unlikely? I don't doubt that a lot of people are doing exactly that. You can probably do whatever you want as long as your risk tolerance is high enough and eventually you don't mind receiving a cease & desist in the mail.
It's much the same with the various attempts at recreating Windows/Mac UI/UX in the various *nix distros out there, or whatever the people behind Wubuntu were trying to do with a very clear financial incentive: https://youtu.be/QQD3yx-JF2E
In my eyes, it's a gray area of questionable ethics, at least in the case of copies, a bit like the various video game emulators, YouTube downloaders, fan servers for games and so on. In some cases you might end up ruining your life due to actual litigation, though. Probably not something I'd try to personally do, but common enough to raise an eyebrow, yet not spark outrage on my part.
> Let's take Slack and Discord for example - I don't know who was first but you can see similarities, however one is not a rip off another.
Is Discord and Slack similar? Not really, not that much. Slack and Mattermost or Rocket.Chat, though? They're quite alike, to the point where someone could take an issue with it, yet there's been no controversy about that: https://imgur.com/a/3n5ssQQ (random online screenshots)
Granted, they also diverge as time goes on, even if the target audience is very much the same.
> The case discussed here is that Tegon copied Linear's interface design (colors, icons, spacings, layout, widgets, etc) almost in a pixel perfect manner, they didn't even bother with introducing their own tweaks found through user feedback.
I wonder if we'll get a lot of litigation around things like that in the future, since companies really care about their branding. Back when half the web looked like Bootstrap, you didn't hear a lot about that, though. Companies most likely won't sue each other for using the same component libraries, whereas the actual UI/UX similarity is probably a scale of sorts, a wide area in the middle is probably just "doing whatever works and what people are used to".
I wonder what the closest copy to Jira is, that'd be like a speedrun at getting sued.
On what grounds? Do they have a patent on spreadsheet-looking interfaces?
It leaves a bit of a bad taste IMO to blatantly copy a startup that’s working its ass off to create a good product and then releasing it as open source, but I have a hard time imagining you can make this legal. Not a lawyer though.
It leaves a bit of a bad taste IMO to blatantly copy a startup that’s working its ass off to create a good product and then releasing it as open source, but I have a hard time imagining you can make this legal. Not a lawyer though.
Copyright infringement based on Copyright law.
Lawsuit under what law? The general design of a user interface is not copyrightable, although the assets are. If it was sufficiently distinctive it could be protected with a trademark.
This is not a "general design", it's almost a pixel perfect clone. The law is: copyright law, it doesn't have to be protected with a trademark since UI design is an "artistic work" hence protected by copyright law by design. The Linear company owns the copyright law that was transferred to them during the work of a UI designer.
It’s going to depend a lot on the nature of the design. The kind of flat designs that are popular these days have a very low degree of originality.
Copyright doesn’t protect functionality, which would rather be protected by patents. So you cannot say “This UI element functions in this way and this is protected”. It is purely about how it looks, and everything looks much the same these days.
Copyright doesn’t protect functionality, which would rather be protected by patents. So you cannot say “This UI element functions in this way and this is protected”. It is purely about how it looks, and everything looks much the same these days.
Todoist has had this interface for years. It's standard nowadays, like a grid. I really don't get what people see in Linear; it is way overhyped but a polished app.
Put a screenshot of Todoist, linear and Tegon. You will see which is inspired or copied. That's the point a few are making here.
Linear is a great tool but honestly it’s mostly because it’s bug free and has a decent amount of features. Project management software feels like it will eventually become commoditized I think, if we haven’t arrived there already. In the end there’s only so many ways to abstract what a “project” is so eventually the selling point will be based mostly on automation, integrations and UX after that original set of features is there.
It’s why I’m quite bull on GitHub’s project management software, because they’ve already got the integration and automation stories handled. They just need to catch up with feature parity and UX. The second that they get that, they will absolutely start eating these other companies lunch. And they are getting closer every year
It’s why I’m quite bull on GitHub’s project management software, because they’ve already got the integration and automation stories handled. They just need to catch up with feature parity and UX. The second that they get that, they will absolutely start eating these other companies lunch. And they are getting closer every year
Here's a side-by-side. This is way past "taking inspiration"
https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1788527859952238598
https://x.com/thisritchie/status/1788527859952238598
this was the first thing i noticed.
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> Then we use AI to automatically create a title from the description, so you don't have to spend time figuring out a title
Yes please, tickets that POs spent even less time thinking and writing about.
Yes please, tickets that POs spent even less time thinking and writing about.
While I can detect that perhaps you don’t feel like this is a useful feature, this is absolutely a legitimate and useful feature. I use it literally every day with Linear. With Linear you can make a ticket in Slack by clicking the … and selecting “make linear ticket”, which gens out a ticket that summarizes the title using AI and pulls in the conversation that you genned it out from, including future updates. The ai autocomplete/title suggestion, while wrong about 25% of the time, removes a huge mental burden around building tickets. If it’s wrong, I just erase the sentence and type my own summary, which takes about 2 extra seconds. But even the wrong summary usually offers good enough context to be able to write the correct one faster.
As an Ops/SRE guy who deals with constant interrupts being able to quickly spawn a ticket and have it pick up the slack conversation saves me literal hours of rote ticketing bullshit every week.
As an Ops/SRE guy who deals with constant interrupts being able to quickly spawn a ticket and have it pick up the slack conversation saves me literal hours of rote ticketing bullshit every week.
Imo thinking about the title actually helps you to get a clearer view of the problem
What about the dozens of people on the team that don't/won't do that? It's not just engineer/technician who write bug.
Thank you for your validation. Indeed, we have removed the title from the standard issue creation process. We are also actively working to improve it.
I’ll also add, not shilling for you, but only because I think it is valuable boots on the ground information: The product owners in our org don’t ever use this feature. The only people that use this Linear feature are engineers like myself who are more interested in doing work than spending all day writing about work in tickets.
Gotcha thank you :+1
Also since you are thinking in this space, you are probably interested in WHY it’s wrong 25% of the time. It’s because the way slack discussions about issues go is heterogeneous in our org. If you are lucky someone was diligent and made it into thread, at which point the AI is quite good at its job. But often (myself included, because sometimes you’re just lazy and sometimes in an incident things don’t necessarily happen in the cleanest way) no threads are created and you need to gen a ticket off a single sentence. Which if you feed as part of a RAG-like prompt is not going to be very useful in a lot of cases.
Unfortunately there’s no clean obvious way to “guess” what the context is under those conditions, but maybe someone can be clever with heuristics to try to do that where they perhaps feed the last X amount of tokens in from slack and do a Langchain-like approach where first the context is summarized in the initial call and then the title is generated from that summary
Unfortunately there’s no clean obvious way to “guess” what the context is under those conditions, but maybe someone can be clever with heuristics to try to do that where they perhaps feed the last X amount of tokens in from slack and do a Langchain-like approach where first the context is summarized in the initial call and then the title is generated from that summary
Thanks a ton. That's a lot of detailing on the use-case. We will definitely put these thoughts as we improvise.
Bro, work in tickets is half the solution to a problem!
Our goal is to inspire people to provide comprehensive descriptions of the issues they report, without the worry of making them concise. From our experience, while it's easy to describe things, articulating them can be challenging. Hence, we encourage thorough descriptions first and then we'll help refine them into a clear, well-contextualized title.
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This sucks. You should be embarrassed for yourself. The blatant ripping off is disgusting. Do better Harshith, this is not it.
There's a ludicrous aspect to software development, which is if you ask around about early uses of computers you'll run into lots of people doing critical path analysis for other industries, yet we have persisted in pretending software development is somehow unique and does not actually work like this.
The whole idea humans should be prioritizing tasks has been wrong from the start, and indicates a lack of the right information in the system.
The whole idea humans should be prioritizing tasks has been wrong from the start, and indicates a lack of the right information in the system.
Any helpful links to further reading on this? It sounds interesting. I'm sure some of the ludicroucity you're seeing is to do with the wide diversity of companies and industries software developers work in.
CRitical path works well when you have a clear idea of how long tasks generally take. with software its much harder to evaluate the length of the work for something you implement for the first time.
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Looks like a blatant ripoff of Linear. The UI is virtually identical.
Hi Harshith, love what you'll are building and love the clean interface. We've started using Tegon and I think this might be the PM tool we've always been looking for
Thank you
When adopting tools into a company there are many factors considered beyond just the product itself. One of the big ones is trust. I can't imagine many decision makers seeing what you've done and coming to the conclusion that you're a business they can trust to weld to their own. Internally we treat most of them as partnerships, not transactional.
People tend to assume tools are easily swappable in organizations. They are not. It is a major risky decision that has large cost, privacy, and security concerns. Attorneys are heavily involved in the process (ask me how I know).
Now we could make this risky and costly bet on a well established, trustworthy company, run by industry leaders... or we could go with a company who is now well known for completely ripped off the design of the former and slapped some AI into it. Which would you choose?
If you want to build a successful company that tries to take down Jira (PLEASE DO), you can't start like this.