Show HN: Paca – Lightweight Jira alternative for human-AI collaboration (github.com)
47 points by pikann22 3 hours ago
I built Paca out of pure passion—a free and lightweight Jira alternative written in Go where humans and AI agents work together as equal teammates to plan sprints and assign tasks to each other. It is fully customizable with custom views, fields, and a WASM-based plugin architecture. My team uses it daily for our own development, so it will be continuously maintained and completely free forever
crossroadsguy 2 hours ago
People who like Jira (or rather want; I doubt one ever “needs” this thing), and make decisions on its implementation and payment, and force it on others, are not the people who are shopping for alternatives. So who these alternatives are really for?
sambucini an hour ago
i always quite liked the flexibility of jira and the ability to logically connect tickets etc. I can see how it's perceived as this clumsy corporate tool, but i often whish gh issues had more of the features jira has.
onlyrealcuzzo an hour ago
There's an entirely new class of people doing development with AI.
Presumably some of them?
dagss 36 minutes ago
What are people's workflows these days?
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.
aynite 26 minutes ago
Was thinking about building something similar, thanks for sharing.
Glad to I'm not the only one thinking about moving away from Jira
sambucini an hour ago
I've been trying keeping an eye on open source issue trackers/project managament tools I can self-host -- with good cli/mcp capabilities. So quite happy to see this as I feel there isn't a lot! (currently also using gh issues) will check it out!
eisbaw an hour ago
Backlog.md the project: tasks live in your repo, atomic and race free
reactordev 42 minutes ago
This couldn’t have come at a better time!! This is exactly what I was going to build next now that my agent swarm is done.
Tsarp 2 hours ago
Awesome to see this. Like a few others here, I hand-rolled (well, Codex-rolled) something similar that works great for me. I keep going back and forth on open-sourcing it, but my hunch is people won't really adopt these kinds of things anyway.
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.
Lucasoato 2 hours ago
I think we can consider this among the positive consequences of LLMs. Building software is cheaper, you don’t have anymore to adapt your company processes to the tools available in the market. If you don’t find what you’re looking for, you can build it and actually see if there’s a market interest for it.
amoerie an hour ago
Aren't we losing something there too though. I always respected a company with a product that had "things figured out" and pushed their product in conjunction with a way of working that was well researched and proven to be optimized.
I'm not convinced companies always need software tailored to their workflows, and could benefit from adopting worn-path workflows instead.
everforward 24 minutes ago
Tsarp an hour ago
ozim an hour ago
kamikazechaser 2 hours ago
Specifically on the AI side, how does it compare to beads?
hmokiguess 2 hours ago
I'm using GitHub issues and GitHub Projects with `gh` cli and I find it works well, though what I really like about this is your project level chat. I find myself having to come back to a project level session often. May give this a try, just hesitant to put it on something that's in-flight with already lots of stuff, will have to be a net new project.
pikann22 2 hours ago
Thanks! Glad you like the project-level chat. Starting with a fresh project is definitely the safest bet to see if the workflow fits you. If you ever do try it out, I'd love to get your feedback!
kolinko 2 hours ago
Thanks for open-sourcing this! I built something similar for myself, but after few months it's so personalised that it's in no shape to be open-sourced.
pikann22 2 hours ago
That is exactly how this started! It's so easy for internal tools to become a mess of hyper-specific features.
I 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!
aniokono 2 hours ago
In my mind Jira is gone, glad to see others are thinking in the same direction.
Where does Jira really sit in a world eaten up by vibecoding?
pikann22 2 hours ago
Thanks! That's exactly why I built Paca. Traditional Jira feels way too slow when vibecoding—with this, we can just use the project chat to co-plan and assign tasks with AI in real-time.