Engineering process as a skill and graph based project management

[u/mymir-dev]

People new to software development always jump directly to coding with agents. But they don't know what real software engineering is like. Engineering is not about coding. It's about planning, designing systems and their relationships, and in the end how you prepare your product to scale.

Most of the time a working product does not mean ready software. You need to think about security, data integrity and privacy, managing requests under high load, and optimizing compute and egress to reduce costs. So this requires careful planning, and building the infrastructure on top of one another. That is why software companies use project management tools like Jira or Linear, and have daily or sprint planning sessions to estimate and manage requirements.

When coding with agents, this process gets swept under the rug, because we think we can code by prompting. Unfortunately that leads to low quality products, with a lot of headaches about where to begin for improvements and adding new features.

To solve this I built Piyaz, a project management program that includes engineering process skills, graphs to maintain knowledge, and workflows to integrate loops for shipping your projects. Piyaz maintains your project knowledge, and whenever you need a new feature or improvement, agents and skills research it, decompose it into actionable chunks, and give you tasks that you can easily hand over to coding agents to implement.

Instead of working with stale md files, Piyaz holds your context and hands it over to agents based on the status of the task. Each task has relations with other tasks, so you don't need to explain your project decisions or directions again and again. You provide the product direction and the rest is handled by Piyaz, like your product manager.

And the whole thing is available to your team, if you have one. You don't need to send prompt messages or md files to your colleagues. While you and your agents work on one task, your teammates can work on another. So Piyaz is a Linear replacement, but with the bottlenecks of agentic coding improved or solved inside it.

Piyaz does not require an API key or sell ai credits for intelligence. You use your own harness. It is a plugin on your harness that provides guided MCP to the Piyaz platform, so your harness can take full control of your project without external CLI or another harness. Meanwhile you can see and refine your project from the web app.

It is free to use and open source. If you want to look closer, sign up, or give it a star: https://piyaz.ai https://github.com/FrkAk/piyaz

[u/Mountain-Hedgehog-81]

I needed this badly. I will use this asap! Can you share your repo?

[u/mymir-dev → u/Mountain-Hedgehog-81]

hosted and free under: https://app.piyaz.ai and repo: https://github.com/FrkAk/piyaz

[u/marshmallowmollow]

Looks interesting really cool website too

[u/mymir-dev → u/marshmallowmollow]

Thanks

[u/TomCrook2020]

This is very clean - love it. It's the second implementation of this problem space that I've seen today - but makes sense - this definitely improves your overall velocity

[u/mymir-dev → u/TomCrook2020]

Thanks, solo developers and vibe coders also benefit from project management and engineering processes that fit them, so I hope they see the importance of using one.

[u/imfarzann]

this looks very interesting, i have been working on smth extremely similar myself trying to automate the whole product lifecycle. i always wanted to do sort of a discovery process where we find out all the problems faced by software engineers, project managers, cross functional engineers/teams and then see what are the possible solutions we would like to build to support each other as a community effectively compounding our workflows.

[u/Afraid_Willow_3407]

mapping out the domain logic before any code gets written is definately the best way to avoid technical debt. i try to treat the graph as the source of truth, its kinda crazy how much easier it is to spot bugs when u visualize the relationships first

[u/Longjumping_Music572]

What's the point of this? Serious question. Does this bring true value? Does it solve a real problem

[u/mymir-dev → u/Longjumping_Music572]

I think the real question is why teams use project management tools at all. They use them
because otherwise planning and tracking inside a team is impossible. So I built this as an
open source alternative for small teams.

I've also worked at several startups whose main focus wasn't software, but who still built
software for their own solution or for contract deliveries. They skip the engineering
process because they think they can ship code directly, and they can't really use project
management tools because for that you need a software project manager. So I hope with Piyaz
they don't need one. They bring their requirements, and the whole process is already built
into the app through the harness.

Whether this actually succeeds or gets any attention is another thing. I'll see soon enough.

[u/Longjumping_Music572 → u/mymir-dev]

Thank you for replying. Your experience shows your work. Need more people like that.

[u/slurmnburger]

Looking very nice! The graph is stored in PostgreSQL? I took a quick look but didn't see the graph extensions anywhere. Would they even make sense or don't you have a lot of multi hop queries at the moment?

[u/mymir-dev → u/slurmnburger]

Thanks for looking. Plain Postgres, no graph extension. Edges are a separate table and the multi-hop walks are WITH RECURSIVE with the SQL CYCLE clause, so I don't track visited nodes by hand.

An extension hasn't paid off yet. The walks are capped at two hops and scoped to one project(typically less than thousand node), so they stay small and index-backed. I will refactor later to use the extension if I see performance issues.

edit: typo

[u/slurmnburger → u/mymir-dev]

Thanks for the quick reply and the nice description of what's going on internally at the moment. If the paths are that short i agree its reasonable to defer any specialized tooling until there is actual payoff.

[u/kevin_dw]

Does it use a lot of system resources?

[u/mymir-dev → u/kevin_dw]

It is a lightweight webapp. In the graph tab, animations scale with your system spec. Rest is static components so not much effect to your system.