You didn't realize it, but the last time you built a Jira workflow, you wrote a program. A bad one, probably — no version control, no tests, no linter — but a program nonetheless.
The Uncomfortable Truth About Jira
Jira started as a bug tracker. A humble list of things that were broken, assigned to people who would fix them. That was 2002. Fast-forward to today and Jira is a sprawling automation engine with conditional branching, state machines, persistent storage, and event-driven triggers. It has, without anyone really intending it to, crossed the threshold into Turing completeness.
This isn't a hot take for engagement. Nicolas Seriot actually explored this — demonstrating that Jira's workflow and automation system is expressive enough to simulate computation. And once you see it, you can't unsee it.
The implications are weird and worth unpacking.
