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.
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- Bitbucket workers are hopelessly out of date (self hosted).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.
It can't be that hard to just dump/export the entire JIRA in one day and migrate it to something else like linear.app? i was already exporting HTML dumps of the entire JIRA and using it in local tool calls to ground agents as far back as last year instead of wrestling with JIRA API to get it to work. This was before linear became popular.
The migration would take 1-2 engineering man-days I suppose. But its money well spent.
I worked there and the answer is the engineering talent isn't great, in addition to being very unfocused, and tons of pointless org churn. Bitbucket pipelines/workers was originally implemented, essentially, by two guys (I know, because I sat 2 rows of desks apart from them!) if that tells you anything. I doubt there was more than one person actively maintaining it for the past decade, if they didn't get laid off recently. That office doesn't even physically exist anymore, and the people are long gone.
A result of their performance-review driven development. Every engineer, product manager and team is focused on one thing only. Get through the reviews. That means building feature after feature, projecting revenue/cost savings that may not materialize.
No one is focused on quality of the feature. It is all about speed. No one stops and thinks that may be users doesn't care about it. Data science teams are focused on cherry-picking data in a way that shows positive impact to show to the leadership that things are working. Engineers and teams are disincentivized to improve existing features, performance issues(unless it impacts revenue/some enterprise customer complains) and sometimes being punished for it. They are also steadily downsizing their support teams to cut costs.
Things are not going to improve. You should move away.
> Anyone have any insight into why things have got so so dysfunctional?
My theory is that there is no incentive for things to not be dysfunctional. At my org anyway Atlassian is almost as entrenched as Google, and we can't even conceive of using something different.
I use plane.so for personal projects after learning about it here. It's a lot simpler and the UI takes some getting used to, but it's fast and it works.
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.
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 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.
Will Atlassian be harvesting code and content from private Bitbucket repositories? The wording in their policies and FAQ's is vague, so I'd like to get a definitive (Yes / No) answer.
I think I looked for this months ago, and my interpretation was that no, they were not doing AI training with it.. but with this announcement, I will be moving all my stuff to my own servers.
cloud repos are handy, but, having to constantly worry if some criminal comes "joinks, its my data now", is not worth it.
I read this as "Stop using this product" toggle every time a company does this without consent. It has done a good amount of mental and financial improvements to me.
Plenty of other companies enable this by default too, such as Github, Figma, Adobe, Vercel. I think it's fair to assume that if you ahve data stored within any company, they'll by default use it for training.
We need to kill SaaS. Apps should be local-first and have peer-to-peer data sync. These companies won't stop until they use your data to replace you and enrich their owners.
I am wondering why not just rsyncrypt the source code before pushing to the repo?
>rsyncrypto is a utility that encrypts a file (or a directory structure) in a way that ensures that local changes to the plain text file will result in local changes to the cipher text file. This, in turn, ensures that doing rsync to synchronize the encrypted files to another machine will have only a small impact on rsync's wire efficiency.
The only silver lining I can see in this is that if they replace their existing tooling with AI integration, we might actually get search and confluence that works.
I've lost count of how many times I search for a keyword and get no relevant results, but the document I'm looking for, which contains the keyword, is in my automatic pop-up of recent documents visited.
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 87.3 ms ] threadAll 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).
- 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.
You yourself just admitted that you still use their products often.
The migration would take 1-2 engineering man-days I suppose. But its money well spent.
No one is focused on quality of the feature. It is all about speed. No one stops and thinks that may be users doesn't care about it. Data science teams are focused on cherry-picking data in a way that shows positive impact to show to the leadership that things are working. Engineers and teams are disincentivized to improve existing features, performance issues(unless it impacts revenue/some enterprise customer complains) and sometimes being punished for it. They are also steadily downsizing their support teams to cut costs.
Things are not going to improve. You should move away.
My theory is that there is no incentive for things to not be dysfunctional. At my org anyway Atlassian is almost as entrenched as Google, and we can't even conceive of using something different.
I use plane.so for personal projects after learning about it here. It's a lot simpler and the UI takes some getting used to, but it's fast and it works.
I am 100% supportive of it being used for training... AI, you, everyone.
https://www.atlassian.com/trust/ai/data-contribution/faqs
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.
cloud repos are handy, but, having to constantly worry if some criminal comes "joinks, its my data now", is not worth it.
>rsyncrypto is a utility that encrypts a file (or a directory structure) in a way that ensures that local changes to the plain text file will result in local changes to the cipher text file. This, in turn, ensures that doing rsync to synchronize the encrypted files to another machine will have only a small impact on rsync's wire efficiency.
https://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/focal/man1/rsyncrypto.1...
I've lost count of how many times I search for a keyword and get no relevant results, but the document I'm looking for, which contains the keyword, is in my automatic pop-up of recent documents visited.