I built Paca out of pure passion—a free and lightweight Jira alternative written in Go where humans and AI agents work together as equal teammates to plan sprints and assign tasks to each other. It is fully customizable with custom views, fields, and a WASM-based plugin architecture. My team uses it daily for our own development, so it will be continuously maintained and completely free forever |
This is what I did with this project https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit/ and to be honest the approach grows on me and fits well if you are a backend person.
This looks great for me. Better than what I have, smaller/cheaper/more AI focused than Jira.
Presumably some of them?
PM says "we're going to start using Jira", engineer says "how about we use this thing that looks similar but is not as terrible as Jira?"
As I use claude more and more I've started using git worktrees, one branch per worktree per PR, with possibly multiple agents working in each worktree at the same time on different aspects. And I manually instruct those agents. Like Emdash/Cursor/Zed. Sometimes I review code locally, sometimes agents push and I review in GitHub, no clear system yet. (jj seems promising, but Zed doesn't seem to support jj as well as git, so have delayed looking at it.)
But Paca is hinting in another direction where the agents are more in control of the branches/worktrees to use and are created by the agent? What tooling is used to support such flows? Would people use GitHub with Paca or is GitHub redundant as well.
Everyone ends up with a workflow shaped really tightly around how they work, and it's gotten so cheap to just build and evolve your own as the models and harnesses change that picking up someone else's stops making much sense.
I'm not convinced companies always need software tailored to their workflows, and could benefit from adopting worn-path workflows instead.
Glad to I'm not the only one thinking about moving away from Jira
I spent a lot of time trying to keep the core lean and moving the custom logic into the WASM plugin architecture precisely to avoid that trap. If you have any specific features from your internal tool that you found indispensable, I’d love to hear about them!
Where does Jira really sit in a world eaten up by vibecoding?
I’m dubious, because for an established company the question is whether the software adapts to the org, or if the org adapts to the software. It’s a lot harder to change the workflow of a whole company than to buy software that enables your current workflow. There’s months of retraining and figuring out where compliance goes in the new workflow, and things that get done wrong along the way because it’s new, and etc.
You need a pretty big efficiency win to offset the dead weight of time spent just changing workflows.
Currently though we are in a world where things change every week, model capabilities, harnesses, pricing etc. Forcing a norm wont work, because there is no such norm.