Leantime vs Shortcut
Side-by-side trajectory, velocity, and editorial themes.
Leantime swaps its rich-text engine, ships experimental PostgreSQL, and spends a month fixing the fallout.
Leantime just landed 3.7, which replaced TinyMCE with a Tiptap-based editor across every rich-text surface, redesigned the wiki, and added experimental PostgreSQL support beside MySQL/MariaDB. The three follow-up patches in three weeks are real bug-fix work — PostgreSQL ROUND/GROUP BY errors, ticket PATCH 500s, session lifetime regressions — not cosmetic tidying. The team also pushed accessibility to WCAG 2.1 AA in the prior 3.6 line.
Leantime is mid-modernization: editor stack, database portability, and design-system tokens are all moving at once. The volume of PostgreSQL-specific bug fixes since 3.7.0 suggests Postgres is being driven by real users hitting real edges, not just a checklist item. Editor-related fixes show Tiptap migration is still settling in.
Expect 3.7.4 within a couple of weeks closing the remaining migration-era bugs, then a clearer 3.8 push around design-token rollout or PostgreSQL going non-experimental.
Shortcut redesigns its API for AI agents and pushes Korey beyond its own walls.
Shortcut is making concrete bets on agent-based work. API v4 entered alpha on May 12 with explicit framing around expanded capabilities and 'agent compatibility' — a positioning shift, not just a version bump. Their in-house AI assistant Korey is expanding outward: right-click access in February, then a dedicated Chrome extension in April that runs on any webpage. Around the strategic work, smaller improvements (Teams on Roadmap, March's SLA Alerts) keep shipping, alongside feed-noise from brand-guide pages being scraped as if they were releases.
Shortcut is positioning itself as the project-management surface that AI agents naturally operate against, not just a PM tool with AI features bolted on. Korey is being pushed from in-app helper toward general-purpose web assistant; the API is being redesigned with external agent consumers in mind. That's a coherent strategic stance the bigger PM players — Jira, Linear, Asana — have not yet made as explicitly. Underlying release cadence stays steady, suggesting these are strategic plays, not panicked pivots.
Expect API v4 to surface MCP-style tooling endpoints and structured action surfaces aimed squarely at agent frameworks. Korey's Chrome extension is likely a stepping stone toward a 'Korey anywhere' positioning — deeper integrations with browser, email, and calendar are the natural next dominoes.
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