Most teams already have somewhere work lives: Linear, Jira, GitHub Issues. When you start handing that work to AI coding agents, the obvious move is to point the agent at a ticket. Trackers even have MCP servers now, so an agent can read the ticket itself.
That works, up to a point. A tracker is built for people planning and following work. An agent doing the work needs a few things a tracker was not designed to give it. This page sets out where each fits, because for most teams the answer is both.
Side by side
| Issue tracker | Passalong | |
|---|---|---|
| Built for | People planning and tracking work | People and agents doing the work, and what they know |
| A ticket says | What someone wants, in their words | The same, plus a summary a person can read and what done looks like |
| Who has it | An assignee, usually a person | A claim by one agent, released when it stops |
| Two agents on one ticket | Nothing stops it | The second is told it is taken |
| Progress | Status columns someone moves | A note per milestone; silence shows as stalled |
| Done means | Someone moved it to Done | A hand-in with evidence; anyone can reopen it |
| Bugs an agent finds | It tells you, if you ask | It writes them down, one per bug, with evidence |
| What the agent learned | Lost when the session ends | Written into the project's documents |
| Roadmaps, sprints, estimates | Yes | No |
What a tracker does well
Keep your tracker for what it is good at. Planning across a quarter, prioritising a backlog, sprints and estimates, reporting to people who never open a terminal, and the conversation that decides what to build. Passalong does none of that, and does not try to.
Where agents need more
A ticket is written for a person. "Login is broken for some users" makes sense to a teammate who was in the standup. An agent starting cold needs what is wanted, where to look, what must not change and how to check it is done. Without that, it guesses, and you review the guesses. How to write a task an AI coding agent can finish covers the difference.
Assignment is not a claim. A tracker assigns work to a person. Run several agents and nothing stops two of them taking the same ticket, or tells you one has been stuck for an hour. Passalong claims the work for one agent, shows who has it, and marks it stalled after half an hour of silence.
Done is a status, not evidence. In a tracker, done means someone moved the card. When an agent did the work, you want to see what it ran and what came back, against each thing you asked for, before it counts.
Agents find more work than they were given. A good agent notices the flaky test and the broken page next door. In Passalong it writes each down as its own piece of work with evidence, rather than fixing it in passing or mentioning it in a summary you skim.
What the agent learned has nowhere to go. A ticket closes and the comments sink. In Passalong each product is a project, and its documents hold what to know: how it is built, what was decided, what to avoid. Agents read them and write what they learned back, so the next one starts knowing it.
Using both
The practical setup for a team with a tracker:
- Plan in the tracker, as you do now.
- When a ticket is going to an agent, turn it into Passalong work. Your agent can do this: with your tracker's MCP server and Passalong both connected, ask it to "read the ticket and write it down as Passalong work, with what done looks like".
- The agent takes the work, does it and hands it in with evidence. Finishing is final; if it does not hold, reopen it with the reason.
- Close the ticket.
The tracker stays the record of what the team decided. Passalong is where the agent's part of the work happens and gets checked.
The whole loop
With Passalong connected to your tools, an agent can run the whole loop itself: write down the bugs it finds, take work that is waiting, report progress, hand it in with evidence, and write what it learned into the project's documents. Nothing gets copied between tools by hand.
It works from Claude Code and Codex, and from ChatGPT and Claude as a connector.
npm i -g passalong
passalong setup
passalong login
Connect your tools, or read about running several agents at once.