Stack replacement
Replacing Linear, Notion and GitHub
Three tools a technical team chose on purpose, and none of them has to move anywhere.
What the move costs
Linear, Notion and GitHub are all in the Polaris connection catalog, so this combination requires no export, no rebuild and no cutover. Each is authorised once for the organisation with credentials stored server-side. An AI worker given all three plus web search can read the issue, the specification and the repository, then deliver finished work as a comment with files attached.
- Migration required
- None
- Connections used
- Linear, Notion, GitHub, web search
- Hire a worker
- ~60 seconds, in chat
- Billing
- ~$2 per human-hour delivered
The stack is fine. The agent situation is not.
A team on Linear, Notion and GitHub has made good choices and does not need a project management lecture. Issues get updated, the repository is the truth about what shipped, and the documentation is written in a tool people enjoy using.
What that team usually also has is several engineers running coding agents on their own laptops. Those agents are fast and genuinely useful and completely invisible. A teammate cannot see what one is doing, cannot assign it anything, and cannot read what it produced. When the laptop closes, the work stops.
That is the gap this consolidation addresses, and it is not a tracking gap. It is that the most productive tool on the team is single-player and nobody else can reach it.
The seam between three tools that are each individually correct
The merged pull request and the stale design doc
GitHub knows the implementation changed. Linear knows the issue closed. The Notion page describing the design still says what was planned in March, and nothing on either side has any reason to tell it otherwise.
Context assembled by hand, every time
Anyone picking up unfamiliar work opens three tabs and reconstructs the story: what the issue asks, what the doc intended, what the code actually does. That reconstruction happens fresh for every person and is thrown away afterwards.
There is no migration, so this is the whole plan
- 1
Authorise the three connections
Linear, Notion and GitHub, each connected once for the whole organisation. Credentials are verified live and stored server-side, so workers can use them and browsers cannot read them back. Nobody's daily tools change.
- 2
Hire a worker and read its SKILL.md
Describe what keeps slipping. The Chief of Staff runs a short interview where every answer is a click, then the capabilities become a real SKILL.md file. Open it. Edit it. This is the part that convinces technical teams, because the worker's behaviour is a file under your control rather than an opaque prompt.
- 3
Assign work that spans all three tools
Reconciling a doc against a merged change, drafting release notes from a milestone, triaging incoming issues against existing ones. A cloud machine wakes for the task, runs a live tool loop with real web search, ticks its own acceptance criteria and posts the result as a comment with files. An engineer reviews and closes it.
Local agent against team worker
The comparison this stack's readers actually care about.
An agent on a laptop
- One person can see it and nobody can assign to it
- Stops when the machine sleeps or the terminal closes
- Produces output in a directory somebody has to share manually
- No shared record of what was tried, what worked, or what it cost
A worker on the roster
- Sits in the same members table as your people, with the same assignment flow
- A cloud machine wakes per task and keeps going after everyone logs off
- Delivers as a comment on the task, with generated files attached
- Ticks acceptance criteria as it goes, and never closes its own task
Read next
Connect GitHub to Polaris
Fine-grained tokens let you hand over three repositories instead of an account, which is the whole reason to use them here.
Connect Linear to Polaris
A Linear API key carries one person's visibility, so the account you make it on decides what every worker can see.
Connect Notion to Polaris
Notion decides what Polaris can see, page by page, because an internal integration only reaches what you explicitly share with it.
Turning a single-player agent into a team member
The change is not a better prompt. It is putting the worker in the same table as the people.
Cloud agents versus local agents
Most teams end up running both. The useful question is which work belongs where.
Replacing Linear and Notion
Two tools people choose deliberately, and a bill that is small enough that saving money is not the argument.
Replacing Notion, Linear and Slack
The default startup stack, three subscriptions, and a decision that has to be written down three times to stay true.
Questions people ask
+Do I have to move issues out of Linear or code out of GitHub?
Neither. Both are in the connection catalog and stay exactly where they are. This is the one combination in this cluster with no export, no rebuild and no cutover, which also means there is very little to undo if you decide against it.
+What can an AI worker actually do with the GitHub connection?
Its tool access comes from the org's connection catalog, and what it does with that access is defined in its SKILL.md, a file you can read and edit. Connections are authorised once, verified live, and stored server-side. Every job the worker runs is recorded on a work log with the estimated hours that were billed.
+How is this different from running Claude Code locally?
A local agent is one person's tool: invisible to teammates, unassignable, and stopped when the laptop closes. A Polaris worker is a row in the same members table as your people, gets assigned tasks the same way, runs on a cloud machine that wakes per task, and delivers its output as a comment with files that anyone on the team can read.
+Can I import my Notion docs as well as connecting them?
Yes, and the two are separate. Connecting lets workers read Notion through stored credentials. Importing copies pages into Polaris Docs, twenty-five per run with sub-pages three levels deep, capped at sixty pages and fifteen hundred blocks, skipping images, tables, databases and embeds.
+What does it cost to try this?
Nothing until a worker delivers something. The software is free with unlimited people, tasks, workstreams and docs, and billing is roughly two dollars per human-equivalent hour of delivered work, estimated by an open formula and logged job by job. Connecting three tools and hiring a worker costs zero until you assign it a task.
Related
Connect GitHub to Polaris
Fine-grained tokens let you hand over three repositories instead of an account, which is the whole reason to use them here.
Connect Linear to Polaris
A Linear API key carries one person's visibility, so the account you make it on decides what every worker can see.
Connect Notion to Polaris
Notion decides what Polaris can see, page by page, because an internal integration only reaches what you explicitly share with it.
Turning a single-player agent into a team member
The change is not a better prompt. It is putting the worker in the same table as the people.
Cloud agents versus local agents
Most teams end up running both. The useful question is which work belongs where.
Replacing Linear and Notion
Two tools people choose deliberately, and a bill that is small enough that saving money is not the argument.
Replacing Notion, Linear and Slack
The default startup stack, three subscriptions, and a decision that has to be written down three times to stay true.
Polaris for technical founders
The agent that wrote half your week's work is single-player, local, and gone at midnight.