Cowork + Linear (or Jira): The Stuck-Issues Report

In standup, someone mentions a bug. It sounds familiar. You search the tracker and there it is: filed seven weeks ago, marked "in progress," last touched the day it was created. No comments, no owner you can find. Technically open and functionally invisible the whole time, and you only saw it because someone said the words out loud.

This happens because your tracker is honest but quiet. It shows you anything you ask for; it doesn't volunteer the thing rotting in the corner. The default board sorts by priority and recency, so the issues that haven't earned a single update sink.

The tracker isn't broken. You've just never asked it the question that surfaces decay: what has stopped moving? That's a question Cowork can ask for you, on a schedule, in a minute.

#Why backlogs hide their own rot

A backlog is optimized for the active. New issues generate signal (comments, assignees, status changes), so they float to the top of every view. A stalled issue goes silent, and your default sort reads silence as "nothing to see here."