Jira Is Turing-Complete
86 points
3 hours ago
| 14 comments
| seriot.ch
| HN
jdthedisciple
1 minute ago
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What annoys me about Atlassian products (Jira, Confluence) is the long load times and terrible layout shifts:

you never know if the layout is about to shift ever so slightly more causing another in a series of misclicks.

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Buttons840
56 minutes ago
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Jira is popular and has good API wrappers for your favorite language. I'm surprised corporate programmers with the hacker spirit haven't automated most of the things they are asked to do in Jira with Python command line scripts or whatever.

If you can make Jira an order of magnitude easier to use for yourself than for the people pushing it, suddenly the script flips and Jira is something you push to protect yourself. I've used Jira to almost a malicious extent at times, and it's a great tool to cover your ass. If you ever get in trouble for something you just point out "this was all made clear in the hundreds of Jira updates I've written, you've been reading those, right?". What are they going to do? Ask you to use Jira less?

We have AI now. Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

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Groxx
51 minutes ago
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Quite a few have, the issue is that every Jira instance is a fractal shit snowflake of custom properties several layers deep through old failed migrations to new organization strategies.

And many times the API can do stuff that the UI doesn't allow, and everyone's relying on the UI to drive things, so you end up in weirdly broken corners because you didn't notice that you need custom_field_5537 to be paired with custom_field_442 or it doesn't appear on anyone else's dashboard. Also it claims custom_field_10995 is an integer type field, and returns as integers in the XML, but there's a pile of undocumented magic constant strings that you have to use instead when creating (but not updating!) a task or you get useless error messages. The web UI doesn't do this though (it's just integers in html and the request), and only 80% of the strings match the display text in the dropdown.

Automating Jira is the absolute worst programming experience I've ever had. I can completely believe that simpler setups exist and they're probably quite easy, but omfg.

Sadly it's still completely worth the effort. Highly recommended.

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jiggawatts
3 minutes ago
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I just had a thought: is there some API so obscenely baroque and painful to use that even AIs would flatly refuse to work with them?

It would be an interesting exercise to keep feeding a coding agent ever crazier interface designs until it cracks.

“The base64 of the rot13 encrypted EBCDIC string has to be included in a JSON in the XML SOAP request, but both the JSON and XML escaping is manual and incorrect.”

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madduci
38 minutes ago
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Our main problem is only that they are hijacking the prices incredibly.. Lately we had to cut the number of licences and users, since it was incredibly expensive.
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consp
33 minutes ago
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> Hook it all together with a custom script and have the AI do all the Jira crap for you.

As if the bloat on Jira isn't big enough already. Adding more text will make it even slower since it will somehow automatically run everything over all that text all the time. If you need heating at your company, use Jira.

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_ZeD_
53 minutes ago
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> corporate programmers with the hacker spirit

that thing does not exists

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lmm
1 hour ago
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That explains why it's impossible to tell whether any given Jira operation is going to halt or not.
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kvgr
7 minutes ago
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I think at least 60% companies that use Jira could do better with just Trello. I dont know how it is possible to create such a horrible mess with task manager and some reports. But it probably keeps the managers and POs bussy so :D
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taspeotis
33 minutes ago
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I came back to a workplace, that still used JIRA. Obviously during the interview I was like oh JIRA yeah yeah yeah you still use that? I can use that.

Anyway yes, I can use JIRA. But it was a real shock to see the latest version of JIRA. It has a thousand papercuts, one of the worst is double clicking on text select stuff suddenly kicks fields into editor mode.

What I was remembering was JIRA Server 4.0, you can walk down memory lane here* - zoom in enough and you'll see each issue has a title, type, fix version, affects version, and so on, and then you end up going straight to the comments. Very straightforward.

* https://www.jirastrategy.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/depl...

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hyperhello
1 hour ago
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Jira is completely awful and thus has the potential to take on any other form of awfulness.
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0xffany
1 hour ago
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Or is it Awfully-Complete? :)
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qsort
57 minutes ago
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Jira is the ultimate example of the concept of alienation. If Marx knew about Atlassian the Grundrisse would have been insanely lit.
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unconscionable
21 minutes ago
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Woof. JIRA is so slow, and managers never seemed to set it up correctly. I have trauma from using it!
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0xbadcafebee
19 minutes ago
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I love Jira automations. Whenever I start on a new team using Jira, I go in and set up automations that do things like auto-count the subtask story points to fill the parent task's story points, or automatically move tickets to backlog if they don't have fully refined properties (missing user assignment, missing story points, missing priority, missing description, etc). In one sprint the team has a more organized board. Dunno why they're not the defaults, but easy enough to fix with automations.
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pbowyer
9 minutes ago
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Jira is the one product I feel needs to be AI native.

AI native in the sense that it papers over the pain points.

New JIRA admin? AI will set it up to do what you want (after all, Atlassian has a great training set as they can see which Cloud installs work well)

Need to set up a workflow? Bam, AI to do that.

Need to onboard a user or manage permissions? Again, have a chatbot to do it (as a time-to-time Jira standin Admin, changing permissions always needs doing in 2+ places and devolves into a "Can you see this yet?" round of questions)

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noja
16 minutes ago
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Any good alternatives to Jira, locally hosted without a huge licence cost?
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fercircularbuf
57 minutes ago
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Not surprising if you've worked with their automation flows in-depth before. What's surprising is how awful their automation flow tools are to work with. Feels like programming in assembly to accomplish what you want.
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pjmlp
1 hour ago
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All workflow and orchestration engines are Turing complete, the whole purpose is to automate execution flows.
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snemvalts
1 hour ago
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How many of them can run infinitely? Or be re-triggered by humans to continue where they left off?
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pjmlp
1 hour ago
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Depends on how you code the workflow and transition state triggers.
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tgv
1 hour ago
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I don't think so. First, JIRA is not orchestration. Second, all workflow needs to do is associate some status with external information, and make it easy to manipulate those. You need triggers and rules, some thing like infinite counters, two stacks, a bidirectional tape, etc.

Prove me wrong!

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pjmlp
1 hour ago
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Yes, and the rules engine is there when creating custom workflows.

https://developer.atlassian.com/server/jira/platform/creatin...

I also explicitly mentioned workflows on my comment.

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tgv
47 minutes ago
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You implied all workflows, not just Jira.
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pjmlp
28 minutes ago
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And I stand by it, naturally it depends on the specific workflow engine how those features are exposed.

Then we can split hairs about which one don't really support it, so that you want win Internet discussions about all not being all.

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dostick
27 minutes ago
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It can’t be because in order to administer Turing test the system has to be usable straight away. This system requires extensive training and specific knowledge and steps for that.
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bluehatbrit
23 minutes ago
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The Turing test is to test whether a programme exhibits intelligence.

Turning complete is a measure of whether something can be used as a programming language to run as a universal Turing machine.

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rectang
56 minutes ago
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Even more nauseating than https://brainfuck.org
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