Linear has always been about coordination and communication in the company. You could have always just built features directly to the codebase, but then there is not that much visibility to others and understanding why the changes were made, or how it was decided. Your codebase is also not the source of customer problems, feedback or bugs. They get reported from customer channels, and Linear has tools to manage those workflows, and then automatically connect it to agent + human execution. There is also time shift where you might want to sit on a feature a while and collect more feedback or have a discussions to understand the full picture. Linear is this centralized place for the whole org. The danger of jumping to isolated solutions quickly is that you don't realize the larger pattern. What has changed that execution bandwidth has increased because agents, but I would argue that having direction, intent, context or communication has even increased because faster you go, the more streering you should have. I think the misnomer is that issue tracking is classically considered as some kind of "engineering tasking tool", like tickets flow from the front desk to the kitchen and then completed. But we always thought Linear as product building tool, having the tools, communication channels and workflow rails to work through problems. But I think we will as an industry find how tools or workflows will need to evolve and problems no longer matter and what new problems arise.
