I've spent the last fifteen years walking into engineering orgs that said they did "CI/CD" (there's no such thing, CI and CD are distinct practices) and "Agile", and proceeded to ship annually through release ceremony and theatre. There are more than a few dark-agile patterns I'm sick of seeing, so I built a project management tool that avoids them, and that exists to be a coun
# THE TAKE Mainline's rejection of backlogs and story points isn't revolutionary—it's admission of defeat by another name. The author conflates *surveillance* with *visibility*, a distinction that matters. Real problem: most orgs use Jira as a confessional booth, not a planning tool. Backlogs calcify. Story points become performance theater. That's organizational failure, not methodology failure. But here's what Mainline actually does: it *atomizes accountability*. No backlog means no commitment surface. No points means no capacity modeling—just vibes-based scheduling. Call it "flow-based" if you want. I call it the same chaos that precedes the 3 AM PagerDuty incident. The surveillance critique holds teeth: most project tools are telemetry pipelines. Mainline gets that right. But removing measurement doesn't create clarity. It creates plausible deniability. Good engineering needs friction—not between humans and tools, but between assumptions and reality.
What the Documents Show
This observation prompted the creation of Mainline, a project management tool explicitly designed to eliminate the surveillance apparatus that has become standard in tech. By removing backlogs, rejecting story points, and abandoning detailed time-tracking systems, Mainline attacks the infrastructure that enables workplace surveillance while simultaneously questioning whether these mechanisms ever actually improved software delivery. The tool operates on a radically different premise: that the detailed quantification of work is not a management necessity but rather a control mechanism that distorts engineer behavior and reduces software quality. Organizations that implement story points don't ship better software—they generate better-documented work that can be used to justify staffing decisions and performance management. The mainstream tech press largely ignores this dimension, framing project management tool selection as a neutral technical choice rather than a fundamental decision about workplace power dynamics.
Follow the Money
Venture-backed project management platforms like Jira, Monday.com, and Asana have thrived precisely because they excel at creating the surveillance infrastructure enterprises demand, offering executives detailed dashboards of team velocity, individual contribution metrics, and predictive burndown charts that have nothing to do with shipping quality software and everything to do with justifying organizational structures and performance-based compensation systems. The industry celebrates "transparency" while implementing opacity—employees can see their work quantified in ways that enable judgment, but executives rarely face equivalent scrutiny of their own output or the actual business value their management layers generate. Mainline's approach—removing backlogs, eliminating story points, and refusing to create detailed surveillance data—represents a rejection of the assumption that software engineering can or should be managed like factory floor production. The tool forces organizations to confront whether their elaborate quantification systems actually serve engineering excellence or simply serve management's need for control and documentation. By existing, it demonstrates that alternative approaches are possible, that teams can coordinate work without generating continuous surveillance data, and that the detailed metrics most organizations obsess over may be actively harmful to software quality. For engineers and knowledge workers broadly, Mainline signals something larger: the tools shaping your work life are not neutral infrastructure.
What Else We Know
They are deliberate choices about what gets measured, who has access to that data, and how it gets used in employment decisions. Most organizations have never seriously questioned whether detailed work surveillance improves their actual outcomes—they've simply accepted it as inevitable. One person asking "what if it didn't have to be this way" opens space for others to do the same.
Primary Sources
- Source: Hacker News
- Category: Surveillance State
- Cross-reference independently — don't take our word for it.
Disclosure: NewsAnarchist aggregates from public records, API feeds (Federal Register, CourtListener, MuckRock, Hacker News), and independent media. AI-assisted synthesis. Always verify primary sources linked above.