I tested out Atlassian Rovo last year. I tried to get it to list all of the Confluence articles I had written in 2025 so I could use that information for my performance review. It found three, regardless of how I queried it. I had actually written over sixty. I tried, but never did found a good use case for it. Too unreliable.

The peak was right before they launched marketplace in my opinion (2013?). After that they had no incentive to improve Jira/Confluence, easier to take the marketplace cut. I could never understand why they couldn’t solve the speed issues though. It just got worse and worse.

Jira is, uh, not my favorite software (ask my manager), but "AI-based replacement Jira" is the worst AI thing I've heard, and that's saying _a lot_.

As digital post-it notes, I’m not sure how I would replace Trello with AI. But otherwise I think your going to get mass agreement that Atlassian is running into the ground.

Agile itself is predicated on software being difficult to ship/expensive. It might not make sense to continue (waterfall might be better actually)

The real problem is that company decisions will never be made as fast as software can be written (and rewritten) now.

Glad you mentioned Google Sheets. I moved my personal task tracking from Trello to Notion to Sheets. Sheets has been the best for me. Infinite customizability, fast, lean.

when agile was fairly new I worked with remote developers that had 3 locations.

My specialty is software requirements and my team was brought in to do the product management. The developers had read somewhere if you were using a database to do requirements then you were doing agile wrong.

They wanted me to write post it notes in triplicate, then fedex them to all their offices.

In many cases, sticky notes are more productive.

In my last jobs Jira was used, and despised by all except product managers. It just becomes a mess. In my startup (now 20 people), we use Trello. Outsiders look at us funny. I respond that its the same company after all...

> Layoffs because of AI make no sense to me.

That's because these layoffs aren't about AI. They're about firms that overhired and Wall St is (finally) having a sobering moment of their (profit) growth potential.

It’s not that they believe AI tools are replacing workers, it’s using the new free cash flow allows them to invest in AI.

They are betting that their AI business will be profitable, and need to cut costs to invest in it.

It makes quite a bit of sense if the size of your market doesn't expand along with the new technology and you don't have a competitive advantage. Just because you have the capability to deliver more packages doesn't necessarily mean you'll have customers willing to pay you to deliver more packages.

In a world where you don't need 10 horses to do the job of 5 cars, because your business doesn't have a market for 10 cars.

You're mixing up what AI is for compared to horses and cars. Horses/cars enable people to be more efficient. AI enables companies to fire people.

Horses/cars improve productivity. AI reduces payroll costs. That's the whole game here.

They just announced GA of agentic assignees. It suggests a year or more of maturation. Rovo Dev has already been a thing.

The Java products are almost EOL.

They have already been assigning JAC tickets to Rovo and $TEAM is down.

What else should be done with the surplus headcount?

You need a very different skill set and culture for driving and maintaining cars than for driving and maintaining horses. I honestly think that for big changes like this (if you are willing to accept that AI is such), looking at it from the portfolio management angle, it makes more sense to just nuke the current operation and start a greenfield one.

It's more about looking good for Wall Street. For example, Block was just rewarded for a similar move: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/block-stock-explodes-jack-dor...

I don't think AI is even partially to blame. Unless Atlassian is claiming AI can fully replace 1,600 workers, layoffs don't make sense.

You need people driving AI to get the benefits.

Its like a courier service that uses horses firing people once cars are invented because cars are faster than horses. You would switch everyone from horses to cars and deliver more packages.

I wholeheartedly believe that they could not have fixed it with 9,600 people months of work. They haven’t been able to fix it with many multiples of that.

I mean probably not. It's not 1,400 hardcore engineers and 200 Jony Ives being let go, it's a mix of everyone including randoms like HR and the person who orders the office coffee. Business is not good.

Okay I just wrote an "it's not, it's..." organically, is this the zeitgeist or what.

If someone like OpenAI or Anthropic pulls it off, and imposes strong opinions similar to SAP (your business adheres to their vertical model vs them tailoring SAP to your unique business), I think it could replace Atlassian tools (Jira and Confluence specifically) relatively quickly. Call it “Planner” or something similar. Tell the Robot what you want and have it build and manage the plan. Atlassian’s revenue is their opportunity.

... all of them at this point? ;-)

Be interesting to see the numbers graphed over time.

Funny thing about AI layoffs is the cloud cover it provides to do it. Which I know is not a fresh insight. :-)

In HR speak, if you 'reduce headcount' because you over hired or needed to cut costs, then that's a bad signal to the markets.

If you do it because of AI efficiencies, you are an innovative industry leader and your stock goes up.

Atlassian stock up 2% on the news :-/

Have you tried nothing at all? Had great success with this on a 150+ dev team. Much preferred to jira. Admittedly does require a different approach to work than a jira-centric team is going to be familiar with.

Linear is great if you fit into its workflow. It's very dev orientated.

I work on Aha! Develop https://www.aha.io/develop/overview which I obviously think is a great tool, especially if you're a team with a product manager.

I used ClubHouse years ago. https://todo.vu/ is pretty good too.

According to this survey, Linear: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pragmatic-eng...

I like Clickup's way of allowing arbitrarily nested subtasks and easily promoting/demoting a task across levels, without having this hard distinction that Jira has between levels. I understand that some coporate managers like the rigidity, but in practice, it's just very hard to know the scope of a story early on, and I found this flexibility really valuable.

A pad of Post-It notes.

I prefer GitLab issues

Linear is pretty nice IMO otoh have not experienced it at megacorp scale.

I don't know if it's "popular", but I use Clickup at work and I think it's generally fine. At least when I have used it it's less laggy and horrible than Jira.

Linear

Linear is great

I'm interested in OSS alternatives, even if not as popular.

Mantis is awesome

Excel spreadsheets, because that's what every project manager ends up using to actually get work done.

Notion is nice

What do you need out of Jira? Most any firm I’ve worked for could replace it with Trello or any Kanban style tool in a heartbeat.

If everyone else is downsizing and using AI as an excuse, it's both a pretty good cover for any firing you might have wanted to do for a while, and you can reasonably assume you can hire back in the future because everyone else is firing too. Maybe you can even depress their wages a little?

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I distinctly remember a discussion where someone says "Man, I wish JIRA would add this feature/fix this bug"

Someone else pipes in: "I bet there is already a ticket on the JIRA bugtracker/feature board for this, it's not done and it's from 9 years ago" and lo and behold there was.

It is just regular layoffs, and doing so admits they don't know what to do with the 1,600 people anyway, and probably didn't know what to do with them for years.

AI isn't going to help, but it bandaids over the issue so the investors aren't spooked.

I think with fewer people working on it, the rate at which it gets worse will now decline!

> there's always an infinite supply of new work that could be done

I definitely buy this for the software sector or the economy as a whole, but for an individual company? Seems one would be bottlenecked by various factors quickly.

Perhaps better to let people go so that they can be productive elsewhere?

The comments hit at some, but not all, of the underlying drivers. I'll add a more comprehensive view and let you draw your own conclusions:

* Their balance sheet paints a messy picture. Their gross profit per quarter doubled from 23Q1 ($668mn) to 26Q2 ($1.35bn), but their net income has been a consistent loss - from -$13mn in 23Q1, to -$42.6mn in 26Q2. The company has generally failed to turn a meaningful profit after considering operating expenses, reflecting misaligned priorities of leadership.

* Their headcount similarly whipsaws of late. In 2021, it was 8.8k; by 2025, it was 13.8k; in the middle of COVID, it was as low as 6.4k. Even after these job cuts, their headcount remains roughly flat from 2025.

* Cutting jobs to invest in AI when you're already slowly bleeding cash isn't exactly a winning strategy. Atlassian's products have the benefit of organizational "stickiness", and their push to a cloud-only SaaS model hasn't gone all that well if you read the IT rags (lots of uniquely complicated migrations that don't transition well 1:1 to SaaS).

* That said, pointing to AI while cutting jobs isn't a bad play when you're courting investors, many of whom doubt the long-term viability of the XaaS model when AI can slop up boilerplate and internal-only solutions on the fly. If they're doing it to genuinely cut costs and try and right the ship, fingering AI isn't a bad cover.

* Except the reality is most of Atlassian's leadership gets their comp in equity, which has taken a serious hit of late on the markets just as vesting schedules wind down and leadership is changing over. I'd be on the lookout for SEC Form 4's from insiders in the coming weeks to confirm whether or not this was the case.

The reality is that the "AI layoffs" ploy is almost exclusively a cover story for corporations reasserting dominance and power over workers after a few (comparatively) good years (WFH, higher pay increases, wage gains, flex-time, etc). Every single one of these entities obviously has more work than people to do it, but if they can squeeze 90% of the workforce for 110% of the hours, that's a net gain for the corporation and a net loss for workers.

Efficiency, over-hiring, right-sizing, AI; it's all bullshit smokescreens for greed, plain and simple. Don't be fooled by narratives to the contrary.

> Instead of firing 1600 people, why not have all of them use AI to produce more stuff and outrun their competitors.

Alternative take: I can't speak for BitBucket because I've never used it, but I've had enough time with JIRA and Confluence to last a lifetime, and these products are so bad - so clunky, so slow, so much friction in the UI - that I can't really see what useful value adding work Atlassian's 16,000 employees have actually been delivering. From that perspective losing 1600 of them seems like it's not likely to make much difference since, from my perspective as a user, they didn't appear to be doing anything useful in the first place.

I'm sorry if that comes across as a particularly savage take but Atlassian have wilfully been churning out absolute garbage for at least 15 years now (there was a time, in around 2006/7, when I thought JIRA was quite good - genuinely) and their products have made me miserable throughout a good chunk of my career, so my sympathy is pretty limited. If they can be bothered to make the products better, faster, more usable, and remove friction ruthlessly at every turn in their workflows, then I might well change my point of view.

I don't think it can get worse. In fact, it'd probably be better if Atlassian just stopped touching it.

It's likely not all this, but i expect an element is: there is a meaningful number of people essentially refusing to work with AI.

Antidotal but I have spoken to friends at Google who are telling me many co-workers say "I tried it didn't work, ill do it myself" when really they just didn't try very hard at all.

This is a tacit acceptance that AI maybe isn't as great as they make it out to be.

And since the fact that claude code is an electron app and not AI generated optimized binary per platform, it's abundantly clear that perhaps AI is not all they hype it up to be.

It’s not that their employees are no longer needed, it’s that their product (jira) is no longer needed. When you’ve got AI agents taking bigger and bigger steps, you don’t need to micromanage people through jira as much anymore. Companies will likely switch to something lighter.

Jira regularly makes it to the top of lists of the most hated enterprise software, there’s definitely appetite in the market for a replacement.

Their stock has been taking a huge hit over the last few months because of this: https://www.smh.com.au/business/companies/ai-is-eating-softw...

I mean, if they are using more AI and less of the devs who made it what it is... it might be better? A little tongue-in-cheek, but I find jira and confluence much less annoying now that I just made a claude skill for each of them and now I don't have to interact with their UI very often anymore

It's regular layoffs because of AI

95% of these announcements are exactly how you say. There're just too many incentives to layoff and call it AI:

- CEO (under pressure to move in the AI space) comes across as an AI maven

- The shareholders improve margins

I think we're reeling from rate increases. Too much free money for too long.

Atlassian pretending they can pivot into AI, is the most "Hello fellow kids" corporate moment this year.

Their services are barely usable with extreme bloat and lag. With such strong engineering practices, they are poised to make fools of themselves. Can't wait.

Global uncertainty

Tariffs

War in the Middle East

US economy that would likely be in recession if not for massive datacenter spend

Oil at ~$100

But we're laying people off because... AI

I mean look I don't like literally any of Atlassian's products, but they are not a dying company by any measure. They print cash.

TBF they have made major improvements, IMHO, to Jira and Confluence over the past few years.

I honestly hope someone will read this comment and vibecode an Atlassian 2.0 platform, preferably open source. But really, I will take closed source and paid as well - just give me something that's on par in terms of features and integration but without the terrible UX.

To be clear, I agree with the terrible products part - but currently they are not dying because there is no alternative platform which is flexible, scalable and feature-complete enough. You may find alternatives for niches, like GitHub for software engineering, but the Atlassian stuff allows for knowledge transfer and familiarity across many many domains. I've seen it used anywhere from government burocracy to customer service and construction companies. They nailed the abstraction for flexible issue management, just the implementation is terrible.

Atlassian is very far from "dying"

Because cost of AI goes up since it’s an external service

Apparently, shareholders want more profit.

Because you presumably did the same and now have more money to spend!

One time charges are pretty typical when layoffs are announced. They are usually the cost of severance pay for the weeks or months of salary paid to employees who are no longer working. Office space leases are typically long term (multiple years) and accounting rules require they recognize the expected future cost of that now-useless space when the layoff decision is made. In practice, cash won't actually change hands for the office space until rent is due in future months. And companies will work with the landlord to get out of the lease (but often pay some penalty for the privilege).

Also, please note that maybe not all employees on this layoff are US-based.

In several countries, laying off people come with legal requirements for mandatory minimal severance, health insurance extensions, legal taxes and government fees and all kind of compensatory one-time payments for the fired employeer.

Usually layoffs have a one-time charge associated with closures and severance and other such payments (COBRA?).

But $230 million over 1,600 is $145k per person.

Possibly not. Buying yourself out of employment and commercial rental contracts can give rise to costs.

In the UK, statutory redundancy pay, after 2 years of service, is 1 week of pay per year of service and 1.5 weeks if you're over 41.

For a long duration commercial lease it might be worth paying to break the contract rather than the running costs for an unused building.

These are probably short-term costs, with longer term savings projected from the reduction in headcount and premises.

"Charges" are severance and related benefits. If they have to close offices, they may have to break leases, etc.

A charitable take would be that some of that is attributable to benefits packages to help the people transition to new work?

It's the severance cost, mostly.

possibly the spending required to do all the severances

We've switched to Jetbrains Youtrack, it doesn't have as many features, but turns out nobody was using most of them anyway. It's Jira + Confluence bundled together including SSO.

Notepad.

Seriously, you need a heck of a lot more than a random HN reply to give you Jira alternatives if you've been embedded into its ecosystem for any length of time - and my condolences if you have.

Linear

If a shop tells me they use Atlassian/Jira I see that as a big negative.

> I worry that everything in society will become uniform

That’s why “slop” is so appropriate. It’s the runoff from the taps poured into a glass. Tastes like everything, nothing, definitely not pleasing, probably cheap, still effective at getting you inebriated.