Jira Is Turing-Complete • Hacker News Board

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#21

Post by pjmlp » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:43 AM UTC

tgv wrote: post #17

pjmlp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and the rules engine is there when creating custom workflows. https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/creatin... I also explicitly mentioned workflows on my comment.

You implied all workflows, not just Jira.

And I stand by it, naturally it depends on the specific workflow engine how those features are exposed.

Then we can split hairs about which one don't really support it, so that you want win Internet discussions about all not being all.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#22

Post by dostick » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:44 AM UTC

It can’t be because in order to administer Turing test the system has to be usable straight away. This system requires extensive training and specific knowledge and steps for that.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#23

Post by bluehatbrit » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:49 AM UTC

dostick wrote: post #22

It can’t be because in order to administer Turing test the system has to be usable straight away. This system requires extensive training and specific knowledge and steps for that.

The Turing test is to test whether a programme exhibits intelligence.

Turning complete is a measure of whether something can be used as a programming language to run as a universal Turing machine.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#24

Post by unconscionable » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:50 AM UTC

Woof. JIRA is so slow, and managers never seemed to set it up correctly. I have trauma from using it!

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#25

Post by jaspanglia » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:51 AM UTC

[flagged]

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#26

Post by 0xbadcafebee » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:52 AM UTC

I love Jira automations. Whenever I start on a new team using Jira, I go in and set up automations that do things like auto-count the subtask story points to fill the parent task's story points, or automatically move tickets to backlog if they don't have fully refined properties (missing user assignment, missing story points, missing priority, missing description, etc). In one sprint the team has a more organized board. Dunno why they're not the defaults, but easy enough to fix with automations.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#27

Post by noja » Mon, May 25, 2026, 6:55 AM UTC

Any good alternatives to Jira, locally hosted without a huge licence cost?

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#28

Post by pbowyer » Mon, May 25, 2026, 7:02 AM UTC

Jira is the one product I feel needs to be AI native.

AI native in the sense that it papers over the pain points.

New JIRA admin? AI will set it up to do what you want (after all, Atlassian has a great training set as they can see which Cloud installs work well)

Need to set up a workflow? Bam, AI to do that.

Need to onboard a user or manage permissions? Again, have a chatbot to do it (as a time-to-time Jira standin Admin, changing permissions always needs doing in 2+ places and devolves into a "Can you see this yet?" round of questions)

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#29

Post by kvgr » Mon, May 25, 2026, 7:05 AM UTC

I think at least 60% companies that use Jira could do better with just Trello. I dont know how it is possible to create such a horrible mess with task manager and some reports. But it probably keeps the managers and POs bussy so :D

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#30

Post by jiggawatts » Mon, May 25, 2026, 7:08 AM UTC

Groxx wrote: post #16

Buttons840 wrote: post #13

Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever. If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself.…

Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies. And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with cust…

I just had a thought: is there some API so obscenely baroque and painful to use that even AIs would flatly refuse to work with them?

It would be an interesting exercise to keep feeding a coding agent ever crazier interface designs until it cracks.

“The base64 of the rot13 encrypted EBCDIC string has to be included in a JSON in the XML SOAP request, but both the JSON and XML escaping is manual and incorrect...”

"...but first split the string into chunks no bigger than 64 bytes and spread the request amongst HTTP headers instead of the POST body. Reassemble by trying every possible ordering until one passes the decoding steps."