"I was recently talking to a very experienced, very senior person in game development and I asked them, 'How would you make all of game development better?' and they said 'delete every Jira instance across gamedev.'" — Benjamin Carcich
The Problem: Tools That Should Serve Us Become Our Masters
I recently watched @buildingbettergames' video "Why Jira Hurts Game Studios" and it perfectly captures what I've seen across 25+ years in development. The patterns mentioned in this video, play out everywhere Jira becomes the master instead of the servant.
A senior producer once said he could track team progress by watching tickets move in Jira. He could tell who was doing well, which projects were on track, just by looking at the dashboard.
The reality? It wasn't true.
As teams realized they were being watched through Jira, something predictable happened. They started optimizing for Jira instead of optimizing for building great software. They contorted their behavior to make the tickets look good. They gamed velocity metrics. They spent hours feeding the beast instead of shipping value.
Players don't care how many tickets you closed.
But when management treats Jira as reality instead of a model of reality, teams have no choice. The tool that should serve development has become the master we all serve.
🧩 The Cost of Context Switching
Research from UC Irvine found that it takes an average of 23 minutes and 15 seconds to regain focus after an interruption.
Think about your workflow: You're deep in code, holding a complex mental model—variable relationships, edge cases, that elegant solution forming in your head. Then you need to check a story detail. Browser. Navigation. Search. Login again. Find the ticket. Read through comments formatted in someone's custom workflow.
By the time you're back in your editor, it's gone. All of it. That's not a 2-minute interruption. That's 23+ minutes to rebuild the mental context you just lost.
Multiply this by every Jira check during your day. How much time are you actually coding?
💬 What Developers Are Saying
The frustration cuts across every development community:
"Managers mess around with workflows and custom fields that infuriate all the developers" — HackerNews discussion
"As a developer or team member, it sucks to deal with a complex interface just to move your task from ToDo => In Progress." — HackerNews discussion
"I find a simple text file outline like this is so much more convenient than say an app or a web UI." — HackerNews comment
"Planning is hard. These tools throw a big backlog at you and grooming/planning is incredibly frustrating." — HackerNews discussion
"Organizations tend to add way too many custom fields and tags so that doing anything requires entering data into a massive form" — HackerNews discussion
"I ended up with a very simple system: a markdown journal for what I do every day." — HackerNews comment
"Tell me how you'll measure me and I'll tell you how I'll behave." — Eliyahu Goldratt
When you measure developers by ticket velocity, you get ticket velocity. You don't get ownership. You don't get collaboration. You don't get people helping teammates with the most important work because they're afraid their individual metrics will look bad.
You get people gaming the system instead of building great software.
🧠 The Developer's Case for Markdown
Developers gravitate toward markdown for the same reason we prefer grep over GUI search: it's built for how we actually think and work.
When story work lives as markdown files in your repository, everything changes:
- Version controlled — Changes are tracked, diffed, reviewed, and merged like code
- Lightweight — No browser tabs, no loading spinners, no authentication timeouts
- Context-local — Requirements live next to the code they describe
- Editor native — Work in vim, VS Code, or whatever makes you productive
- Searchable — grep works. Your editor's search works. No special query language.
- Portable — Text files work everywhere, on every platform, forever
Need to check a story detail? It's in the file next to your code. Want to update task status? Edit and commit. Need to see what changed in requirements? git diff shows you instantly.
The context switch from "coding" to "checking requirements" drops to zero. You stay in flow.
🔧 What We're Doing About It
Imdone CLI and Imdone Desktop let you work the way you want while keeping stakeholders happy.
Story work lives as markdown files in your repository, bi-directionally synced with Jira:
- Jira issues become markdown files — Full content, comments, attachments, all version controlled
- Bi-directional sync — Changes flow both ways automatically
- Git workflow — Your backlog changes are reviewed and merged like code
- Zero context switching — Check stories, update status, add comments—all from your editor
- Team collaboration — Pair and mob without fighting over browser windows
Management still gets their Jira dashboards and stakeholder visibility. You get to work like a developer instead of a data entry clerk.
The tool serves you. Not the other way around.
🚀 Developers Deserve Better
You didn't become a developer to spend your day clicking through web forms and updating ticket statuses.
You became a developer to build things that matter. To solve hard problems. To create value.
Your workflow shouldn't be dictated by a tool optimized for middle management dashboards. Your requirements shouldn't live in a system designed to generate reports, not to support building software.
Stop serving Jira. Make it serve you.
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