I built Paca out of pure passion—a free and lightweight Jira alternative written in Go where humans and AI agents work together as equal teammates to plan sprints and assign tasks to each other. It is fully customizable with custom views, fields, and a WASM-based plugin architecture. My team uses it daily for our own development, so it will be continuously maintained and completely free forever

You can take it a step further and strip out the frontend. Honestly. Nobody needs it and if you need any UI stuff it in the MCP.

This is what I did with this project https://github.com/crmkit/crmkit/ and to be honest the approach grows on me and fits well if you are a backend person.

What are people's workflows these days?

As I use claude more and more I've started using git worktrees, one branch per worktree per PR, with possibly multiple agents working in each worktree at the same time on different aspects. And I manually instruct those agents. Like Emdash/Cursor/Zed. Sometimes I review code locally, sometimes agents push and I review in GitHub, no clear system yet. (jj seems promising, but Zed doesn't seem to support jj as well as git, so have delayed looking at it.)

But Paca is hinting in another direction where the agents are more in control of the branches/worktrees to use and are created by the agent? What tooling is used to support such flows? Would people use GitHub with Paca or is GitHub redundant as well.

I've been trying keeping an eye on open source issue trackers/project managament tools I can self-host -- with good cli/mcp capabilities. So quite happy to see this as I feel there isn't a lot! (currently also using gh issues) will check it out!

I can't believe you guys give this for free. I was considering buying "Linear", now I just saved 10$/month with this. Thank you so much

People who like Jira (or rather want; I doubt one ever “needs” this thing), and make decisions on its implementation and payment, and force it on others, are not the people who are shopping for alternatives. So who these alternatives are really for?

Backlog.md the project: tasks live in your repo, atomic and race free

Specifically on the AI side, how does it compare to beads?

Awesome to see this. Like a few others here, I hand-rolled (well, Codex-rolled) something similar that works great for me. I keep going back and forth on open-sourcing it, but my hunch is people won't really adopt these kinds of things anyway.

Everyone ends up with a workflow shaped really tightly around how they work, and it's gotten so cheap to just build and evolve your own as the models and harnesses change that picking up someone else's stops making much sense.

I'm using GitHub issues and GitHub Projects with `gh` cli and I find it works well, though what I really like about this is your project level chat. I find myself having to come back to a project level session often. May give this a try, just hesitant to put it on something that's in-flight with already lots of stuff, will have to be a net new project.

Was thinking about building something similar, thanks for sharing.

Glad to I'm not the only one thinking about moving away from Jira

This couldn’t have come at a better time!! This is exactly what I was going to build next now that my agent swarm is done.

Thanks for open-sourcing this! I built something similar for myself, but after few months it's so personalised that it's in no shape to be open-sourced.

great work , i love the ui and the smoothness is cherry on cake.

In my mind Jira is gone, glad to see others are thinking in the same direction.

Where does Jira really sit in a world eaten up by vibecoding?