Early this year I was wiring Claude into Jira through an MCP server. It worked, and every session it felt slightly wrong: slow round trips, a schema I did not control, structure sitting somewhere the agent could not see while it was reading the code.
The fix was almost embarrassingly simple. Put the ticket in the repo, as markdown. I pitched it to a colleague, and off we went.
Seven months later: 15 projects across 10 repositories, 165 live tickets, 12 people on the board including non-developers, and no Jira licence.
This post is why we left and what we built. Two follow-ups cover the rest: the skill and the loop that let agents work these tickets, and the three review layers that keep the output honest.
What was actually wrong with Jira
