I did something this week that I expected to be tedious and turned out to be clarifying.

I took our entire production execution state out of InteliG — every initiative, every theme, every status — and rebuilt it inside Linear. A clean, faithful mirror. The kind of thing you’d do if you were evaluating whether to switch tools.

It took a few minutes. And in those few minutes, the comparison answered itself.

What I built

InteliG’s view of our company, on the day I ran this, was 18 initiatives grouped under 9 themes, spanning 15 repositories — nine already shipped, nine still in flight. Autonomous Intelligence. The Initiative Discovery Engine. Cognis Harness Reliability. SOC 2 Readiness. Each one with a status, a target quarter, and a description.

I mirrored the live roadmap into Linear the obvious way: our themes became Linear Initiatives, our in-flight initiatives became Linear Projects, nested underneath, with matching statuses and dates. Five themes, nine projects. Verified the tree. Done.

It’s a good-looking roadmap. Linear renders it beautifully — it always does.

”So can’t you just import from Linear?”

You can — and you should, if you’re coming from Linear. InteliG can pull your initiatives, projects, and issues straight in, the same way I pulled our data into Linear: through Linear’s MCP or an API key. Migrating in is easy, and we want it to be. Nobody has to rebuild their roadmap by hand.

So the difference isn’t that the data won’t move. It’s what the data is once it arrives.

Everything you export from Linear is intent — the plan as humans typed it. It was true the day someone entered it, and it starts decaying the moment real work diverges. That’s not a knock on Linear; it’s simply what a planning tool holds.

The gap is what happens after the import. Linear keeps that plan and waits for a human to keep it current. InteliG takes the same plan and reconciles it against execution — the commits, PRs, deploys, and meetings the team is already producing — so it tells you not just what was planned, but which of it is actually shipping, what it cost, and where it’s stuck.

That’s the real migration story, and it’s the opposite of a limitation: bring your Linear roadmap in, and gain the layer Linear was never built to have — the one that keeps the roadmap honest without anyone maintaining it. You can always lay reality over a plan. You just can’t get reality out of one — and that missing half is exactly what InteliG adds.

What Linear is genuinely great at

I want to be fair, because Linear deserves it.

For the daily work of a software team, Linear is the best tool in the category. Issues, cycles, triage, assignment, the “what am I working on right now” board. The keyboard-driven speed. The PR-to-issue automation, where naming a branch after an issue moves it across the board. They’re shipping AI features and PRDs fast and tastefully. If your job is to manage the flow of declared work, Linear does it as well as anything ever has.

InteliG does not replace that. We are not where your engineers run their day.

The question is not “is Linear good.” It’s “what does a roadmap in Linear actually know” — and the answer is: exactly what someone typed, and nothing else.

The GitHub test

Here’s where it got concrete.

Linear connects to GitHub. So I connected it. The promise is that your code activity flows into your projects and you can see execution against plan.

Then I looked at the nine projects I’d just created. Every one of them showed zero linked code. Not a single commit. Across 15 active repositories.

Two reasons, and both of them matter:

Linear attaches code to issues, not projects. It links a commit or PR by matching an issue identifier — AMA-123 in a branch name, or “Fixes AMA-123” in a pull request. I had built projects, with no issues underneath. There was nothing for the code to bind to.
Our commits don’t speak Linear. Our engineers cite the real initiative — INI-57 — in their commit messages, because that’s what the work is actually about. Linear has never heard of INI-57. It’s looking for its own identifiers, in its own format, placed there by hand.

So to make that beautiful Linear roadmap reflect reality, the work isn’t done — it’s barely started. I’d have to create an issue for every unit of work, retrain every engineer to name branches and PRs with Linear’s IDs, and then keep every project’s status current by hand, forever. That’s the tax. It’s invisible until you measure it, and it never stops being charged.

What InteliG did instead — without any of that

InteliG never asked anyone to tag anything.

Those 18 initiatives weren’t entered. They were discovered — read out of the commits, pull requests, and meetings the team was already producing. Every commit across all 15 repos was auto-attributed to the right initiative by a matching chain that reads file paths, branch prefixes, repositories, and language before it ever falls back to an explicit tag. A reconciliation job re-checks the links every day and auto-confirms the ones the evidence corroborates.

No issues to file. No branch-naming convention to enforce. No standup spent reconciling tickets against code. The code told the story, and the system listened.

That’s the part Linear can’t follow you into — not because it’s a worse tool, but because it’s a different kind of tool. Linear is a place you put information. InteliG is a system that derives it.

Intent versus execution

This is the line the whole comparison comes down to.

A planning tool — Linear, Jira, any of them — is a record of intent. It tells you what the team said it would do. Its truth is maintained by hand, and it’s only as honest as the last time someone updated it.

InteliG is a record of execution. It tells you what the team actually did — and whether that matches the strategy, what it cost, and where the work is stuck. Its truth comes from git, meetings, and spend, reconciled continuously, with no one maintaining it.

When the board asks whether you’re executing your strategy, a roadmap in Linear can show you what was planned. It cannot tell you whether it’s real. InteliG can, because it built its answer from what happened, not from what was typed.

That’s the difference between a execution intelligence platform and a very good place to keep your tickets.

Verdicts, not vibes. Git is truth. Keep Linear for running the work — bring InteliG for knowing what it means.

I Mirrored Our Whole Roadmap From InteliG Into Linear. The Migration Itself Was the Answer.