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Jira Is Turing-Complete

seriot.ch

51–60 of 160 posts

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#51

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.…

> 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.

That's because corporate IT makes the tokens expire every 2 seconds so scripting becomes useless.

Seriously we have some tokens that expire every 1 hour.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#52

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 boa…

Why would tickets need to have a user assignment to be considered refined? It should be up to whomever picks it to work to get assigned to, not a part of the refinement.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#53
post #43
post #28

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 A…

Jira has an AI feature called Rovo. It's terrible. Giving an API key to Claude however gets you exactly what you need. Albeit in quite a risky way though.

Definitely, that's the issue with legacy tools and just plugging AI agents on top of existing API capabilities that were designed for human in the first place. Retrofitting agent-safety onto APIs that predate agents is harder than it looks (guardrails, permissions scopes etc.)

Disclosure: I'm CTO of an ITSM product in this space (Siit), so I think about this a lot.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#54
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...” "...bu…

>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?

Copilot Studio. It's painful to try to set up any sort of logic within Copilot Studio. Worse if you're not on the most bleed-edging-new machine with overkill levels of ram. So I had a thought... why am I doing this when I have Claude with absolutely no quotas?

Turns out, there's just no way to drive it from Claude. It first started with the pac command line tool, but that's agonizingly broken. Tried to use Chrome next, but even it can't navigate that UI from the browser (neither could I, you'd click and sometimes the response occurs 10 seconds later). Copilot Studio is the quintessential Microsoft technology. Shortly after, Claude began experiencing what I can only call schizophrenic symptoms. It imagined that every time I queried it that there were embedded hacking attempts in my reply and that soon spread to every conversation I had with it even in new chats.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#55
post #16

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…

Simpler setup is perhaps - have a the pm-informed list of req of what your teams' needs and habits, and implement from scratch. Perhaps would take less than customizing JIRA. With history and all.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#56
post #51

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.…

> 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. That's because corporate IT makes the tokens expire every 2 seconds so scripting becomes useless. Seriously we have some tokens that expire every 1 hour.

You have the script auto-renew the token. It's in the spec.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#57
post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...” "...bu…

AIs can barely handle PKCE OAuth flow. It’s not very hard to confuse them.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#58
post #21
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

Well, you did say all. Is there a minimal set of exposed features that must be exposed for a workflow engine to be included?

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#59

I came back to a workplace, that still used JIRA. Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that. Anyway yes, I can use JIRA. But it was a real shock to see the latest version of JIRA. It has a thousand papercuts, one of the worst is double clicking on text select stuff suddenly kicks fields into editor mode. What I was remembering was JIRA Server 4.0, you can walk…

My day job doesn't require using Jira or similar tools any more, so from a perspective of genuine curiosity: what's the consensus among entire project teams (not just the nerds) for a better alternative?
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