How do I keep my project tickets in a Linear project while a Claude Code crew builds them?
Tares lets a project keep its tickets in a Linear project while the software factory for Claude Code builds them. Connect Linear in Settings, then click Use a Linear project on the project’s Tickets page. The crew’s sessions change the issues in Linear with their own tools, and Tares reads them about once a minute to keep the ticket list in step.
How it works
A project’s tickets can live in one of three places: Tares, Linear or GitHub Issues. When you pick Linear, the issues of a Linear project become the project’s tickets.
- Tares reads, sessions write. Tares only reads from Linear. The Claude Code sessions in the crew create and change tickets in Linear itself, using their own tools.
- One read a minute. Tares reads title, status, order and identifier about once a minute. Sync now on the Tickets page reads at once.
- Status mapping. The issue’s workflow state maps to a Tares status. Backlog, unstarted and triage are
todo. Started isin_progress. Completed isdone. Canceled and duplicate arecanceled. - Milestones and dependencies. Tares keeps the Linear project’s milestones and which tickets belong to each. An issue that blocks another makes the blocked ticket depend on it.
- Removed issues. An issue that leaves the Linear project (moved, deleted or archived) becomes
canceledin Tares instead of disappearing, so its working doc stays reachable.
Every change in Linear also becomes an event on the linear source, keyed by the issue identifier such as ENG-123. The event types are ticket_created, ticket_renamed, ticket_status, ticket_reordered and ticket_removed. Triggers and agents can react to them like any other event. The labels you can use are ticket, project and linear_project.
The crew itself is a set of Claude Code sessions on your machine: an orchestrator, a reviewer and builders. Tares holds the plan, the reviews and your answers, while the tickets live in Linear. See Build a software factory with Claude Code for the full crew.
Set it up
- Install Tares and sign in. Make sure Claude Code is signed in, then install the CLI and log in to your workspace.
uv tool install tares # or: brew install glassflow/tap/tares
tares login- Connect Linear in Settings > Linear. One connection serves the whole workspace.
- On Tares Cloud, click Connect Linear and approve the Tares app in Linear.
- On your own Tares, paste a personal API key. In Linear, find it under Settings, Security and access, Personal API keys. Read access is enough.
- Link a project. On the project’s Tickets page, click Use a Linear project and pick one. Its issues become the project’s tickets. Tares creates the
linearsource the first time a project is linked. - Bring up the crew. The crew then works the tickets and changes them in Linear.
tares factory crew up- Check the link. The Tickets page shows “Tickets live in Linear project …” and when it last synced. Change an issue in Linear. Within a minute the ticket follows, and the source’s Recent events shows the change.
A project that already has tickets of its own cannot be linked, so link a project before you add tickets to it in Tares. The Linear connector page lists every setting and event.
What you get
- Your tickets stay in the tool your team already uses. The crew builds them into pull requests while Linear remains the place you read and reorder them.
- A ticket list in Tares that follows Linear within about a minute, with statuses, milestones and dependencies carried over.
- One event per change on the
linearsource, so triggers and agents can react to a ticket being created, renamed, moved to a new status, reordered or removed. - Tickets that never vanish. An issue that leaves the Linear project is marked
canceled, and its working doc stays reachable. - Clear failure behavior. When a sync fails, for example because a key was revoked or the connection can no longer see the Linear project, the Tickets page says why and the tickets stay as they were. Connect again in Settings > Linear to recover.
- An easy way out. Stop using Linear on the Tickets page keeps the tickets as Tares tickets.
When something else fits
Linear is one of three homes for tickets, and the others fit some teams better.
- Tickets in Tares. If you have no tracker you need to keep, let
tares factory specwrite the milestones and tickets straight into the Tares project. There is nothing to connect. - Tickets in GitHub Issues. If your work already lives in a GitHub repo, link its issues instead. Sessions create and change the issues with
gh, and Tares reads them about once a minute. Tares never writes to GitHub either. - A project that already has Tares tickets. It cannot be linked to Linear. Start a new project for the Linear flow, or keep the tickets in Tares.
If you want Tares itself to update Linear, that is not how it works. Tares only reads, and the sessions make every change in Linear. For the crew setup, the crew up prompts and the other ticket options, read Build a software factory with Claude Code.