Linear moves sideways to agentic AI as CEO declares issue tracking dead

Summary

The Linear cloudy issue tracker and project manager has introduced an AI agent and plans to add AI coding assistance, with CEO and co-founder Karri Saarinen declaring that "issue tracking is dead." Now in beta, the Linear Agent works in the online, mobile, or desktop app, and as a plug-in for products including Slack, Teams, and Zendesk. It has a chat user interface and examples of usage are things like "make issues based on the discussion here and assign them to me," according to the introductory post. The agent also supports skills and automations, which require a business ($16 per user/month) or enterprise plan. Skills are workflows saved for future use to automate common tasks. Automations are workflows triggered automatically when issues are created. Future features will include a coding agent to write code and fix bugs, as well as the ability to answer questions about a codebase and to present code diffs (changes made to a block of code). Pricing is unchanged during the beta, but the post suggests that automations and coding features will move to usage-based pricing "beyond a certain threshold." Saarinen said that "issue tracking is dead," arguing that agents "make software development a lot simpler" as they do more of the procedural work. He said that coding agents are already installed in 75 percent of Linear enterprise workspaces, and that the volume of work done by agents has increased five times in the last three months. A diagram in his post shows Linear as a tool for capturing context while agents do most of the engineering work. Despite his post, issues will remain as the core items in Linear. In the company's Slack channel, customers were positive about the announcement, but asked for model context protocol (MCP) support. An employee responded that "we're working on MCP support." One thing not mentioned in any of the posts or agent documentation is security, other than that "Linear Agent operates within your existing permissions." Generative AI system...