Atlassian just goes from misstep to misstep. I still use their products quite often. The amount of P0 bugs I experience is absolutely crazy:
- Bitbucket workers are hopelessly out of date (self hosted). We've had to put so many random workarounds in especially for Docker, as they don't keep them up to date enough
- I have had a bug in JIRA for years where I can't reorder a new ticket unless I refresh the page
- Every new feature they introduce into JIRA/Bitbucket over the past couple of years just doesn't work.
- I tried their AI stuff on the free trial, didn't work at all, tried to cancel, can't cancel the free trial online and had to write a load of support tickets (of which the support ticket contact form bugged out multiple times).
Anyone have any insight into why things have got so so dysfunctional? Tech debt? Talent leaving? Both? Even 'bad' enterprise software tends to be able to keep the most basic features running, but Atlassian is a whole new category. If you check their 'community' it is just hundreds/thousands of bugs with workarounds.
Featureatis. Just keep pumping out features with no thought. Today, probably also AI-coded .
Even in mid-sized projects if you keep pushing for only new features you'll get a similar system. At least my experience in 3 or so midsized projects that I've worked on where nothing else mattered than checking of features from a huge backlog.
The search function in Jira has always been unusable. It’s perhaps the worst part of the entire platform, but nice to see they’re still focused on adding features I will never use.
I've always thought I was the only one experiencing this and felt like I was crazy.
I guess it's "good" to know that I'm not alone.
The amount of times I've searched for a ticket that I know it's there (because I either have it opened in a different tab, or because I just created it), but can't find, it's just way to many.
Umm? Is there single step Atlassian did it right? It's a cancer of software development the suits force us to swallow while real development and useful documents are outside of their service because it's so stressful to use.
I really wish I could find a better source to link to for this. By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training.
The opt-out-by-default pattern has been gradually normalizing in enterprise SaaS, but what makes this particularly egregious is the combination of two things: the data scope (not just metadata, but all in-app content per kevcampb's link) and the broken opt-out (the disabling setting not rendering on any instance).
One is a policy decision you can argue about. Both together suggest the friction is intentional.
The data residency point is worth flagging separately - a lot of enterprise buyers treat region-pinning as a privacy guarantee for everything in their contract. It was never that. Residency tells you where data is stored at rest, not who can access it for what purpose.
If the rumours of an Anthropic acquisition are true, this makes a lot of sense. Anthropic are probably looking for a clean, high-signal dataset of metadata around business tasks that they can buy.
I doubt data in Atlassian are anywhere close to clean or organic. It was designed by hell to swallow shit to real programmer who does real works outside of Atlassian.
Worth noting that Atlassian's data residency options don't exempt you from this—your data can still be used for training even if you've pinned it to a specific region.
Atlassian just goes from misstep to misstep. I still use their products quite often. The amount of P0 bugs I experience is absolutely crazy:
- Bitbucket workers are hopelessly out of date (self hosted). We've had to put so many random workarounds in especially for Docker, as they don't keep them up to date enough
- I have had a bug in JIRA for years where I can't reorder a new ticket unless I refresh the page
- Every new feature they introduce into JIRA/Bitbucket over the past couple of years just doesn't work.
- I tried their AI stuff on the free trial, didn't work at all, tried to cancel, can't cancel the free trial online and had to write a load of support tickets (of which the support ticket contact form bugged out multiple times).
Anyone have any insight into why things have got so so dysfunctional? Tech debt? Talent leaving? Both? Even 'bad' enterprise software tends to be able to keep the most basic features running, but Atlassian is a whole new category. If you check their 'community' it is just hundreds/thousands of bugs with workarounds.
Featureatis. Just keep pumping out features with no thought. Today, probably also AI-coded .
Even in mid-sized projects if you keep pushing for only new features you'll get a similar system. At least my experience in 3 or so midsized projects that I've worked on where nothing else mattered than checking of features from a huge backlog.
The search function in Jira has always been unusable. It’s perhaps the worst part of the entire platform, but nice to see they’re still focused on adding features I will never use.
I've always thought I was the only one experiencing this and felt like I was crazy.
I guess it's "good" to know that I'm not alone.
The amount of times I've searched for a ticket that I know it's there (because I either have it opened in a different tab, or because I just created it), but can't find, it's just way to many.
Umm? Is there single step Atlassian did it right? It's a cancer of software development the suits force us to swallow while real development and useful documents are outside of their service because it's so stressful to use.
Presumably the government and HIPAA carveouts are for legal obligations. Trade secret theft is illegal so I wonder why they're not considering this.
[delayed]
[delayed]
I really wish I could find a better source to link to for this. By default, all free and paid customers are being opted-in to their data being used for AI training.
All your Confluence pages, Jira tickets, etc.
https://support.atlassian.com/security-and-access-policies/d... describes how to disable this, but it also appears that the setting to disable this doesn't exist (it's not visible on any of our instances).
This seems to be the official description of the changes:
https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs
Here's another link: https://www.theregister.com/2026/04/18/atlassians_new_data_c...
Unfortunately that one has a subheading of "From August 17, the outfit will collect customer metadata by default unless you pay for the top tier"
It's not just metadata, it's all "in-app data"
they sent out an email with this: https://dam-cdn.atl.orangelogic.com/CDNLink/AT12MW17.pdf
"Your available data contribution settings will be available no later than May 19, 2026."
So let me guess, they're hoping that we forget about this by then, so that they can scoop up our data? I can't think any other reason for it.
The opt-out-by-default pattern has been gradually normalizing in enterprise SaaS, but what makes this particularly egregious is the combination of two things: the data scope (not just metadata, but all in-app content per kevcampb's link) and the broken opt-out (the disabling setting not rendering on any instance).
One is a policy decision you can argue about. Both together suggest the friction is intentional.
The data residency point is worth flagging separately - a lot of enterprise buyers treat region-pinning as a privacy guarantee for everything in their contract. It was never that. Residency tells you where data is stored at rest, not who can access it for what purpose.
If the rumours of an Anthropic acquisition are true, this makes a lot of sense. Anthropic are probably looking for a clean, high-signal dataset of metadata around business tasks that they can buy.
I doubt data in Atlassian are anywhere close to clean or organic. It was designed by hell to swallow shit to real programmer who does real works outside of Atlassian.
Programmer adjacent data can already be consumed from git repos. Atlassian has PM data.
Worth noting that Atlassian's data residency options don't exempt you from this—your data can still be used for training even if you've pinned it to a specific region.
The official Atlassian FAQ on this change:
https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs
genius move.
I don't see it as a misstep at all. The purpose of StackOVerflow is to share expertise.
I am 100% supportive of it being used for training... AI, you, everyone.
What? Atlassian is not stack overflow.
Dude, what?