11 Comments
User's avatar
Josh's avatar
4dEdited

The non dev roles are probably even more at risk. I’ve lead these teams from CEO, cto, pm role and id argue that now all you need is a technical product person. QA, pm, designer, jr devs and scrum master are all filled by a good agentic harness. Im in the trenches and see far less need for meetings, cross team communication and documentation which is what a lot of jira does. I still use loom which they bought but this is pretty easy to spin up am open source version yourself now. Maybe a couple of hours work with a vps and Claude does mg the lifting. There’s definitely some great finds in the saaspocolypse space but I think this one would need an extremely hard pivot to be relevant in 5 years

Alejandro Yela's avatar

Agreed partially, Josh. The “traditional” overhead is definitely getting squeezed by these tools, but I look at it a bit differently based on two factors: company size and entrenchment.

If you're a small, nimble team, spinning up an open-source alternative or relying on a tight agentic harness to bypass Jira is a no-brainer.

But in huge enterprises, Jira is more of an embedded ecosystem. Ripping it out is not that easy because of legacy workflows, historical data, and pure corporate inertia. I’d say the threat here is a slow bleed as new companies choose not to build on them.

That said, if a company is looking to move away from rigid legacy setups, I’m a much bigger fan of flexible, highly customizable software like http://monday.com. It lets teams design their own workflows on the fly instead of forcing everyone into a strict, pre-baked framework.

One major trap to watch out for with that approach, though, is the "super user" dependency. The moment your entire operational workflow relies on one or two people who actually understand how the custom automation or agentic setup is bolted together, you've just traded bureaucracy for a massive single point of failure.

Josh's avatar

Maybe check this out as an example of a harness I created which replaces agile and has no super user issues. I’ve had lots of non technical friends get insane results from it https://github.com/joshgaskin/catalina might change your mind on some of the points. Your point on enterprise level is valid until massive layoffs come. There will be a lot of shareholder pressure I reckon

Alejandro Yela's avatar

Thank you so very much for sharing. I’ll give it a proper look tomorrow

DJU42u's avatar

Looks like a plug for your project mate, rather than a good analysis. @josh

Great article, I am in a similar mind 👏

Alejandro Yela's avatar

Josh has been with us for the longest time... he's a pretty solid dude

Josh's avatar
2dEdited

Interesting take since this is an open source repo with no commercial value @dju42u

DJU42u's avatar

Your analysis is very poor if you believe your little project is an example of how it takes down atlassian. Your arguments dont really hold up on the enterprise lay offs either. I won't go into it though. Do your research properly

DJU42u's avatar

Yeah as I said, plug for your work. Doesn't need to have commercial value. Its just ego stroking.

TODD SPRING's avatar

Loving your saaspocaplyse coverage

Alejandro Yela's avatar

Would love to hear your thoughts on this. I'm always looking to level up 😊