Karri Saarinen on Linear: how AI is reshaping software development workflows
Oct 31, 2025 with Karri Saarinen
Key Points
- Linear integrates with GitHub Copilot's agent platform to let users delegate tasks directly and review results asynchronously, expanding who can touch the codebase without engineer involvement.
- Saarinen frames AI's impact not as obsolescence but as re-evaluation: issue trackers and pull requests persist as concepts, just as documents survived the shift from paper to word processors.
- Linear is pursuing "self-driving SaaS" where bugs get reported and fixed autonomously, though Saarinen acknowledges pull requests may not survive that transition.
Summary
Karri Saarinen, co-founder and CEO of Linear, argues that AI doesn't obsolete existing software workflows so much as it forces a piece-by-piece re-evaluation of which ones still make sense. His framing: the shift from paper to typewriter to word processor didn't eliminate the concept of a document, and AI won't eliminate the concept of an issue tracker or a pull request. The tools evolve around the activity; the underlying need for coordination, prioritization, and visibility persists.
The most concrete product signal is Linear's integration with GitHub Copilot's agent platform, which lets users delegate tasks directly from Linear and review results asynchronously. Saarinen says the workflow is already expanding who touches the codebase — designers at Linear itself are now using agents to make fixes independently, instructing an agent to find something in the codebase and ship a version, then previewing the result through Linear without involving an engineer at all.
Self-driving SaaS
Saarinen's forward thesis is what he calls "self-driving SaaS" — software that becomes proactive rather than passive. The analogy he uses is transportation: we still need cars because teleportation doesn't exist, so the right move is to make the cars drive themselves. Applied to Linear, the goal is a system where bugs get reported and fixed autonomously, without the team ever seeing the ticket. Whether pull requests survive as a concept in that world is an open question he says Linear is actively working through.
On design, Saarinen acknowledges that Linear's aesthetic has been widely copied — sometimes by companies that no longer know the origin. His response isn't to chase novelty for its own sake. He holds to form-follows-function: productivity tools aren't art projects, and breaking from convention only makes sense when there's a functional reason. The broader aim, as he frames it, is shifting the industry toward craft and quality rather than pure metric optimization.