We stopped paying for Linear — Xiaofei's Yuanyang hotpotIn the last two months, me and my friend Pinglin have been building an interesting project, Pingbo, together, and we have iterated our way into one setup for project management. The road there was longer: a ten-person team on the sleekest SaaS, then a two-person board run entirely by an agent. We dropped both, for very different reasons, and ended up on plain GitHub issues. I think that is where this is all going.

I used to love Linear, but it is not perfect

I am a fan of Linear. We ditched ClickUp for it without a doubt back in 2023.

Compared to Linear, ClickUp immediately felt like a clumsy all-in-one platform that tries to do everything and excels at nothing. Linear is a winner that suits my tastes better, elegant and focused. As a product, it is sleek, it is professional, the UI/UX is phenomenal. It holds high standards when delivering a feature, which I appreciate A LOT. I love products that do less but better.

But this does not mean that it is all a fairy tale when using it. Our team had grown to 10-ish, with one PM, one designer, and the rest engineers. I was overseeing the project development.

We constantly encountered issues: an ever-growing, overblown, outdated backlog; sprints stuffed with more tickets than they could ever finish. Fail enough of them in a row, and the sprint stops meaning anything. Of course, you can say: the tool is not the problem, the way you use it is. Set strict team rules, keep the dashboard clean, and the problem goes away.

But I just don’t think it is that simple. We definitely tried. We defined the full workflow: what labels to use, who should do what after what has finished, setting up every automation we could to cover for human forgetfulness. Constantly reminding the team to follow the rules. No matter how smooth Linear is, none of it held, because the problem is not the rules. Everyone works differently. These tools create a unified platform for everyone to work on, but that does not mean co-working is solved. You can FORCE a unified way for a team to work together, but that demands adjustment, or sacrifice, that bends how each person usually works.

I still remember being stressed, sending messages to our PM complaining: what is the actual status of the project, are we going to finish all the planned features in the sprints? She was also frustrated, because she couldn’t understand why I needed her constant updates, why I couldn’t just read her daily report and go to the dashboard to see for myself.

To make the communication smooth — funny, the word, smooth — we agreed on how the daily report should look, what it should include and what it should not.

Looking back, it is funny to think that we did EXTRA paperwork, designed our workflow around whatever tool we used, and called it smooth communication. Then the rules on the wall slowly got ignored, the docs went stale, and over time it all decayed into a chaotic, outdated junkyard — the paperwork we invented to manage the project became the thing nobody managed. It was not pleasant for either of us. Our PM spent more time managing my expectations; I spent more time trying to feel more in control.

That was my compromise. I started to accept that modern project management is a mess, inevitably. Like, what can you do?

Then, the agent era comes. Things have changed.

Our team stepped into the vibe coding period. Everyone was anxious, doubting, resisting and excited at the same time. More code was produced, so features were expected to iterate and launch faster. At the same time, the market changed daily; we needed to pivot, and we had to cut the team size down. All of it added to the chaos of project management. As a coder and manager, I lived in uncertainty.

We opened the Linear UI less and less; we managed via Linear MCP. I just asked the AI agent to summarize the status. I didn’t need to — or WANT to — go somewhere, click a button, or ask a person in the team, back and forth, to get what I wanted. I would honestly say that the things I used to appreciate — the good UI, the well-built workflow and automations — do not matter that much anymore.

So, I outsourced everything in PM to the agent. Turns out not the best idea

Unfortunately, our product did not work out. It is a long story that I may tell another day, another time. Fast-forward to now: me and Pinglin are building Pingbo together.

OK, a super tiny team still needs project management. I would say even a one-person army still needs project management. Things can get out of hand very quickly when the scope or the details keep changing.

What tool should we use? After everything the ten-ish team had taught us, we dropped Linear first. The price was not even the main reason: if sleek UI/UX does not matter anymore, I just need a place to manage tickets, that’s all.

Then we took it a step further. Since we had become so used to vibe coding, I suggested: why don’t we just use an agent purely for...