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Jira Is Turing-Complete

seriot.ch

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Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#81

Post by ivan_gammel »

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…

A dysfunctional organization will project its failures to everything it touches. I personally have not seen such mess, likely because working in regulated industries means there‘s usually some SOP or work instruction that is regularly updated, so the setup is driven by the compliance process. Nowadays, I opt in for Atlassian because it works fine out of the box, I avoid heavy customization (which would mean tool lock-in), and Claude can move the tickets itself anyway - no scripting required.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#82

Post by auxiliarymoose »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #64
IshKebab wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That version of JIRA could still easily be configured to be awful. That's the main problem with JIRA - the power to actually configure it to be sane is always reserved by a few people who don't want to bother, don't have time and don't care because they aren't really using it every day. Well one of the problems anyway. It's also unimaginably slow, and has weird limitations like issues can't be parents of other issues…

The non-existence or non-availability of recursive features, like an issue being parent of an issue, or in Slack a thread being started inside a thread and so on, to me usually indicates, that the developers of the tool are afraid of recursion, and have never learned how to implement this easily in a database, used a programming language that easily deals with recursion, and don't know how to deal with it in other la…

Alternatively, it is a conscious decision to help prevent users from causing complicated situations.

Given a highly configurable system, users will find ways to (unintentionally) tie it into knots, so adding some guardrails can help reduce complexity demons down the line (both in the technical implementation and the user experience).

I guess I prefer to give people making things the benefit of the doubt.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#83

Post by Atiscant »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #54
jiggawatts wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

It is kind of ironic that the AI building tool is so hostile to AI. Copilot studio really is a hot mess, at least for me.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#84

Post by tgv »

onion2k wrote: post #43
pbowyer wrote: 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.

Russain roulette.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#86

Post by taybin »

codesnik wrote: post #76
Tade0 wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Not a single of the many organisations that I worked for which used JIRA would give the credentials to do anything of this sort.

nowadays you can vibecode some half-ass headless browser automation using your email-password or even weird corporate sso.

That is exactly what i did last week. Got praised for it.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#87

Post by lelanthran »

piva00 wrote: post #52
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #26

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.

He moves unassigned tickets to backlog. That is correct, when a dev is done with their tickets they take a new one off the backlog.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#88

Post by pimeys »

tailsdog wrote: post #68
Cockbrand wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Linear

To give a bit longer answer: Linear.

They have a first class MCP server, and you can basically run a project from your agent. Implementing something, and you find out there's more to do later on in a separate issue? Agent creates the issue for you and off you go. It works very nicely, and also has a great UI but I mostly using it from my agent.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#89

Post by pjmlp »

bigbluedots wrote: post #58
pjmlp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Conditions and state transitions, plus actions for side effects, obviously.

Re: Jira Is Turing-Complete

#90

Post by LtWorf »

fragmede wrote: post #56
LtWorf wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Along with the auto TOTP?
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