Show HN: Tegon: Open-source alternative to Jira, Linear

Having worked quite deeply with Jira and a host of other enterprise products that target this set of use cases, and having a pretty good understanding of what decision makers are looking for when evaluating these products for fit (I have been that person), what does "AI First" mean?

I realize AI is the hype right now and it seems like most products have to pay the AI Tax (i.e. "Yes we're doing AI stuff so you should <buy/sell/fund/etc> our stuff"). But "AI" is a nebulous category, and when a product bills itself as "<Noun>-first", it sets up an expectation that <Noun> is fundamental to the product, i.e. if you stripped all other aspects of the product away, what's left at the end is <Noun>. But I have no idea what that means in the context of the current "AI" hype.

Based on your demos, you've built a fairly standard looking ticket tracking tool that has some AI features. And those are features that every incumbent in this space started adding to their products years ago or are actively doing it now.

I mention this not because I'm trying to say your product doesn't have value, but because the way you're positioning this doesn't make a lot of sense to me. As a prospective buyer, if I'm already using an existing tool, the moment I start digging deeper to know what "AI First" means, I'll find that what this really means is "Jira but with some AI features on top", which isn't very compelling when my <Vendor> account team has been telling me all about their new AI features that I can start using on all of my existing data as soon as I upgrade, no 6-18 month migration required.

If I'm a frustrated customer of those products, AI is not the reason I'll be looking to switch, and I'd be far more likely to be interested in performance, extensibility, openness, integration capabilities, etc.

Maybe that's not the type of customer you intend to target, but if you hope to reach them, I leave this as food for thought. Best of luck to you.

IMO the absolute most important thing with a tool like this is performance. I have to sign in to a handful of cloud desktops each week and interact with customer Jira/Confluence/AzureDevOps/etc pages, and the big thing which kills my engagement is the app not being snappy enough. Doesn't matter how many of the features our Agile SAFe scrum wizard wants me to use, I'm not going to bother if there is too much friction. These apps inevitably require a lot of clicks, so latency becomes very noticeable.

First, congratulations on launching. I think people are so used to seeing beautiful products these days that it can be hard to remember how hard it is to make anything. Nice work! With that out of the way, here is some critical feedback:

- What is the pitch that you made to YC that convinced them to back you? The market size just doesn't seem that large and I don't understand what will differentiate you from Linear (whose design language you seem to have ripped off, somewhat poorly.) This post and the current featureset is vague and does not seem like a significant improvement. What is the core problem you're solving and why is that valuable? Your launch post above describes a lot of "how" but not a lot of "why".

- Why are you bothering to pretend to be "open source"? You're backed by YC and you'll make money selling access to the product on your "Tegon Cloud". If you're really going to be open-source, you need to make some significant improvements before anyone would consider contributing. Some documentation on how to self-host would be a good start. Look at all the environment variables in this dockerfile — which ones are necessary to run this service myself? https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/main/docker-compose.ya...

- If you're going to be "open source", the quality of your codebase and engineering skills is going to be a deciding factor in whether or not you get outside contributors. Consider writing actual descriptions in your pull requests, describing what you've done and why. Here's a PR picked at random — this is bad engineering work and does not encourage others to contribute. https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/pull/114

My advice is that you drop the facade of being "open source", hire a designer, and do some actual user research to figure out where people are actually struggling with their ticketing systems. The features you're building (automatic title suggestion, thread summarization, and "find similar tickets") do not solve the problems that I have had with ticketing systems. They're small, potentially nice-to-have features that absolutely do not help me understand the core question for all engineering teams: who is doing what, how will they do it, why, and when will it be done.

If you are planning to monitise it through SaaS, might be worthwhile to change the license to AGPL from MIT.

Would it be possible to run AI/ML on an existing jira/github large project (k9mail/KDE(gitlab) and show/prove this can be useful/better etc? Thanks

I'm getting a "no healthy upstream" error from the demo link.

I was interested in how the duplicate detection of issues is working. It uses Cohere API for embeddings (full issue text) [1] and vector-based similarity search [2].

[1] https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/158b54af8d6f7cf4195c61...

[2] https://github.com/tegonhq/tegon/blob/158b54af8d6f7cf4195c61...

What evidence do you have that suggests auto-generated titles are better?

I don't know how to write this comment so it doesn't come off as unconstructive. But here you go.

- "AI-first"? What does that even mean? Calling some API to auto-generate a title? Do you really think that a) this solves a big user problem and b) that Linear can't add that in two seconds if they wanted to?

- Open-source and VC-backed? Please stop bull shitting me, and yourself.

- What is your USP? That you're faster than Jira? Fine, but this is not 10 years ago and snappy tools like Linear exist (and I'm not even a fan of Linear).

- elon@xyz.com? Really?

Please use your time and talent for something else than this VC AI pipedream. Or don't, I'm just a rando on HN.

> AI-first

I would've been interested in an actual replacement for Jira/Linear, but I'm uninterested in an unreliable tool where I have to deal with hallucinations. Stop trying to cram this crap into every single software project.

Do you think this would be useful for personal users as a todo/task management app? I have no chance of convincing work away from Jira, but I'm always on the lookout for a better personal task manager.

I logged in around 2024-07-09 10:22 UTC, and I hope the stories in review don't get accepted. You might want to demo the product in a slightly less open way, though.

Thanks for sharing, can you tell us more about the functionality that AI has in your product and what Cohere does for you, above the capability of OpenAI? Ta

Finally got around to checking this out and got: "no healthy upstream"

Do you support local LLMs? I could only see an ENV for OPENAI_API_KEY.

linear set the bar so high but different projects have different needs.. i wonder how tegon and linear compare side by side.

how is it different from the mighty plane.so?