Show HN: Paca – Lightweight Jira alternative for human-AI collaboration
github.comI spent a lot of time trying to keep the core lean and moving the custom logic into the WASM plugin architecture precisely to avoid that trap. If you have any specific features from your internal tool that you found indispensable, I’d love to hear about them!
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 not convinced companies always need software tailored to their workflows, and could benefit from adopting worn-path workflows instead.
Currently though we are in a world where things change every week, model capabilities, harnesses, pricing etc. Forcing a norm wont work, because there is no such norm.
I’m dubious, because for an established company the question is whether the software adapts to the org, or if the org adapts to the software. It’s a lot harder to change the workflow of a whole company than to buy software that enables your current workflow. There’s months of retraining and figuring out where compliance goes in the new workflow, and things that get done wrong along the way because it’s new, and etc.
You need a pretty big efficiency win to offset the dead weight of time spent just changing workflows.
Where does Jira really sit in a world eaten up by vibecoding?
Presumably some of them?
This looks great for me. Better than what I have, smaller/cheaper/more AI focused than Jira.
PM says "we're going to start using Jira", engineer says "how about we use this thing that looks similar but is not as terrible as Jira?"
I like Jira. Much more than Service Now
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.
Glad to I'm not the only one thinking about moving away from Jira
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.
"Fits me well"
So maybe don't speak for everybody?
You can take it a step even further and strip out all the code too!
The next evolution for this is to allow users to use the AI to change the database schema itself. Like if someone is using our restaurant software and wants to start selling merch. I’d want them to be able to use the AI to change the database schema and add products and shipping from the e-commerce one.
I really do think that is the future of SaaS. You start from a base SaaS and the AI customizes it to your business over time.
https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca/security
However I'm getting a 404
https://github.com/Paca-AI/paca/security/advisories/new
(You need to enable private security advisories: https://docs.github.com/en/code-security/how-tos/report-and-..., really not sure why GitHub made it opt-in only)
We're using GitHub for everything here, but was using Jira as an email first helpdesk.
Was hoping this was that - but apparently not at all.
We almost went with libredesk - but it's a little too simple (no merging tickets?). We're giving FreeScout a go - looks like we might need the oauth2 plugin to work with o365 mail ...
[1] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/03/23/strategy-letter-iv...
> A lot of software developers are seduced by the old “80/20” rule. It seems to make a lot of sense: 80% of the people use 20% of the features. So you convince yourself that you only need to implement 20% of the features, and you can still sell 80% as many copies.
> Unfortunately, it’s never the same 20%. Everybody uses a different set of features.
-- Joel Splosky
https://www.atlassian.com/platform/teamwork-graph
Their skills abuse your context window and billing, you'll want to write your own for the 20% you use
Struggling to find a simple task management for work across different repos and some admin+marketing tasks. Become very messy when tasks are distributed among Hermes, Claude Code & myself.
Planned to building on beads to for non-repo based tasks, adding long term goal to keep driving agents busy, UI mainly sits on telegram group with topics. See whether Paca can solve the problem :)
I'm building an IDE for coding agents with a project management kanban board & plugin support as two of its flagship features. I think I can learn a lot from this project in its design as well as presentation.
Plugin sandboxing is an interesting tradeoff. I am planning full "video game coremod" style plugins with full access to the app and system, but it's interesting to see a WASM + sandbox approach.