Lific

Lific is a free, open source issue tracker designed specifically for the way coding agents work. It gives AI assistants like Claude, Cursor, and Zed a place to store plans, track issues, and persist context across sessions. Instead of losing everything when a conversation ends, agents can write to Lific and pick up where they left off. Humans get a clean web interface for the same data, so there is no friction between what the agent sees and what you see.

The core idea is that issue trackers should be simple, local, and compatible with the tools developers actually use. Lific runs on your own machine or server, stores data locally, and exposes a native MCP integration that coding agents can connect to automatically. The setup takes about a minute using Cargo or a prebuilt binary, and once it is running you have a web UI at localhost that shows kanban boards, issue lists, documents, and comment threads.

What makes Lific different from standard project management tools is its focus on context efficiency. The full tool surface uses only around 5,600 tokens, which means agents can have meaningful access to your project state without burning through their context window. This matters when you are working on complex tasks and need the agent to understand what has been done, what is in progress, and what comes next. Lific bridges the gap between ephemeral AI sessions and persistent project memory.

The platform supports hierarchical planning, linking plan steps to trackable issues so you can break down a quarter or sprint into actionable work. There are CLI tools that output JSON for scripting and CI integration, role based access controls scoped to each project, OAuth 2.1 authentication for connected tools, and a full audit trail that tracks every change and who made it. For teams, this means you can give different collaborators viewer, maintainer, or lead access depending on their role.

Lific is built for developers working with coding agents, solo devs who want a lightweight tracker without the overhead of cloud services, and small teams planning sprints or quarters. It is not trying to compete with Jira or Linear on enterprise features. It is trying to be the simplest possible issue tracker that actually works with AI assistants instead of ignoring them.

The project is fully open source under the Apache 2.0 license, hosted on GitHub with an active Discord community. There is no paid tier, no cloud service to sign up for, and no vendor lock in. You install it, run it, and own your data. For developers who have been frustrated by issue trackers that are either too heavy or completely disconnected from the AI tools they use daily, Lific fills that gap cleanly.