World's Fair 2025
Building the platform for agent coordination — Tom Moor, Linear
Overview
This talk explores Linear's journey in integrating AI into its product development tool, moving from early, pragmatic applications like natural language filters to more sophisticated agent-based features. The core thesis is that AI should be seamlessly integrated to provide practical value, acting as scalable, cloud-based teammates that enhance productivity and quality without being overly intrusive. The platform is evolving to support these agents as first-class citizens, enabling complex workflows and interactions.
Who should watch
- AI Engineers and Builders
- Product Managers
- Developers seeking to integrate AI into workflows
- Teams looking to improve productivity and issue resolution
- Those interested in the future of software development tools
Key takeaways
- Linear initially focused on pragmatic AI features like similar issue suggestions and natural language search filters, built on a foundation of hybrid search and vector databases.
- The advent of more capable LLMs in late 2024, with larger context windows and improved reasoning, enabled more robust AI features.
- Linear rebuilt its search infrastructure using Turpuffer for hybrid search and Cohere for embeddings, enhancing its ability to understand relationships between issues.
- New features like Product Intelligence offer advanced issue relationship mapping, while Customer Feedback Analysis uses LLMs to distill insights from user input.
- Linear is positioning itself as a platform for agent coordination, treating AI agents as scalable, cloud-based teammates with identities and histories within the platform.
- Integrated agents, such as Codegen and Charlie, can perform tasks like generating PRs, performing root cause analysis, and managing feature flags directly within Linear.
- The platform is developing new surfaces and an SDK to facilitate deeper agent integration, allowing for more transparent interaction and oversight of AI actions.
- Best practices for agent integration include quick and precise responses, inhabiting the platform's native communication style, clarifying intent before acting, and ensuring agents add tangible value.
Notable quotes
*The way we think about AI as a company is that it should be seamlessly integrated to provide practical value.*
*We figured you know we're already doing a pretty good job of orchestrating humans. And if agents are going to be members of your team going forward, then they should also live in the same place where all of the human communication happens.*
*The agents can tackle it for you. There's nothing to stop you assigning every single issue in your backlog out to an agent and have it do a first pass.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.