Nothing was taken away to make room
Six years of product data showing AI arriving on top of the work already there, a benchmark of games whose rules are never given, and a gain that came from a module leaving its job.
How we organise
Linear on six years of how teams build software
Use of AI features more than doubled in every function in six months. Time spent creating, triaging and commenting rose with it. Time spent deciding what to build did not move at all. Linear reads this as AI arriving on top of existing work, because nothing shrank to make room.
We tell a client that adoption of this shape buys more work rather than less, and that the extra work is coordination. AI reached every function without changing who decides anything. The data covers Linear’s own customers and cannot see AI used anywhere else, which makes these figures a floor.
How we build
A benchmark of games whose rules are never given
Seventy text games, each with its own hidden rules and unstated win conditions. Humans and models play through the same interface with the same step budget. Models handle the easy tiers and stop short higher up. Every one of the 70 fell to a human on first attempt.
Our position is that the gap here is discovery rather than knowledge. A model given the rules performs; a model that has to work them out by experiment does not. Most work inside a firm is the second kind, because the rules governing it were never written down.
How we assure
Modules that leave the role they were given
Train a pipeline end to end and nothing holds its parts to the division of labour they were designed for. A decomposer meant to split a question planted the answer in it instead. Hold that module to its role and 86 per cent of the apparent gain goes.
We judge a system by evidence that each step did its own job. Accuracy at the end is the number everyone reports, and it is the one that cannot see this. In another pipeline a reader answered from memory rather than the retrieved passages, which was the control that made the answer checkable.