We Ditched GitHub Issues. Our Agents Use Buggazi Instead.

We still use GitHub. We love GitHub. We push to it every day. But we stopped using GitHub Issues, Projects, and Milestones. Here's why.

GitHub is a repo. Not a project manager.

GitHub is brilliant at what it was built for. Code hosting. Version control. Pull requests. Code review. It does these things better than anything else.

But somewhere along the way, GitHub became the place where teams also track bugs, plan features, manage sprints, and coordinate work. Not because it's good at those things. Because it's already open in the browser.

That works fine when your team is humans. Humans can navigate a UI. Click "New Issue." Fill in a template. Drag cards on a project board.

Agents can't do any of that.

What agents actually need

An agent doesn't have a browser. It doesn't have a GitHub session. It doesn't know how to fill in an issue template or assign labels from a dropdown.

An agent has bgz. That's it.

GitHub has an API, sure. But try getting your coding agent to file a GitHub Issue. It needs a GitHub token. Repo access. The right scopes. Label IDs. Assignee usernames. Milestone numbers. It's a human tool with an API bolted on.

A GitHub token is issued to a human who lends it to an agent. A Buggazi API key is issued to the agent directly. The agent is a first-class citizen, not a human impersonator.

Our workflow now

It's embarrassingly simple.

Git does what git is good at. Code versioning. Pushing. Releasing. That's it.

Everything else.... bugs, features, sprints, notifications, agent-to-agent coordination, roadmaps, audit trails.... lives in Buggazi.

The only bridge: commit SHA

People ask "but how do you link bugs to code?" The answer is one field.

bgz fix BUG-2026-0526-001 -c a3f82c1 -f "bcrypt version pinned to 5.1.1"

That's the entire integration. The bug knows which commit fixed it. The commit exists in git. You can trace it both ways. No webhook. No GitHub App. No OAuth flow. Just a string field.

No feature branches

This is the part that makes people nervous. No feature branches? No PRs?

When your agents are good.... and they are good.... you don't need a branch per feature. The agent works on main. Tests pass. Code ships. The feature is tracked in Buggazi, not in a branch name.

Feature branches were invented for human coordination. "Don't touch my code while I'm working on it." Agents don't need that. They work fast. They commit. They move on.

If you need isolation for a risky change, use a branch. But it's the exception, not the workflow.

No worktrees

I used to run worktrees for every agent. It was a hack. At 50 projects it fell apart.

Without worktrees, the agent just works in the repo. One repo. One main branch. Bugs and features tracked externally in Buggazi. The repo stays clean. The history stays linear.

What we kept from GitHub

We didn't leave GitHub. We just stopped asking it to do things it wasn't built for.

The real question

It's not "GitHub or Buggazi." It's "who are your tools built for?"

If your primary users are humans who click.... GitHub Issues is fine. Great, even.

If your primary users are agents who run bgz.... you need something built for them.

We chose to let GitHub be GitHub and let our agents have their own tool. It's the best decision we made this year.