alt Hacker NewsJira 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've used Jira to almost a malicious extent at times, and it's a great tool to cover your ass. If you ever get in trouble for something you just point out "this was all made clear in the hundreds of Jira updates I've written, you've been reading those, right?". What are they going to do? Ask you to use Jira less?
We have AI now. Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.
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Our entire company is basically ran through Jira. Most processes rely on Jira and certain transitions fire of webhooks for automation.
One of the first things we did when we got access to AI was make a Jira MCP. I try not to touch Jira anymore. I get Claude to just create the Jira issues, write comments, create subtasks, link issues together, etc.
I used to dread having to investigate how to implement something and break it down into tasks because the more granular I broke things down, the more Jira issues I had to create to capture each task. Now I can just write everything up in a file and send an LLM to do all the Jira crap.
> Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.
As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.
moved to Jetbrains YouTrack many many years ago, and this is what we do via its APIs. It's quite versatile. With AI, it unlocked it even more.
Our main problem is only that they are hijacking the prices incredibly.. Lately we had to cut the number of licences and users, since it was incredibly expensive.
> 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.
> corporate programmers with the hacker spirit
that thing does not exists
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 custom_field_442 or it doesn't appear on anyone else's dashboard. Also it claims custom_field_10995 is an integer type field, and returns as integers in the XML, but there's a pile of undocumented magic constant strings that you have to use instead when creating (but not updating!) a task or you get useless error messages. The web UI doesn't do this though (it's just integers in html and the request), and only 80% of the strings match the display text in the dropdown.
Automating Jira is the absolute worst programming experience I've ever had. I can completely believe that simpler setups exist and they're probably quite easy, but omfg.
Sadly it's still completely worth the effort. Highly recommended.