This is developer wishcasting, to be frank. AI has not obviated the need for Jira and the idea that companies are moving to "something lighter" (what are they moving to?) has no basis in reality.
It really doesn’t matter what us devs think. Investors and industry leaders have decided that AI development is the way forward and we’re going to be managing teams of agents from now on. So we’re not going back to fine-grained task management in jira - what used to live in jira will now live markdown files, and largely be written and read by agents.
Higher level tasks might go into something like Linear, who knows.
If the investors are wrong, and this is all fantasy, then maybe people will go back to Jira, and Atlassian stocks will recover.
They could also pivot to developing something for that exact use case if it’s a bad fit and if there’s such clear demand.
But truly they’re just cost cutting here and AI is really neither here nor there.
I’ve just been surprised lately at how often it isn’t the first thing mentioned. I came from a Fortune 500 and Jira was mostly hated there as well. I still think its foothold is so big that it’ll be a long time before anyone goes through the effort to migrate. I’d personally rather live with it than try to replace it.