Open Source. Terminal-first. AI-governed.

Where devs and AI create products. In a terminal.

Developers can manage products. Product people can ship code. Joy gives both backlog, roadmap, and AI governance with cryptographic identity and an auditable event log. In your terminal. In your git repo. Under your control.

Get Started FreeView on GitHub
joy roadmap
joy roadmap terminal output showing milestones and items with status indicators

What no other PM tool does

AI in PM is not new. AI governance with cost control and data sovereignty is.

Linear / Jira

  • Cloud-only data storage
  • No AI cost tracking
  • No budget enforcement
  • No configurable AI gates
  • No self-hosting
  • Vendor lock-in

GitHub / GitLab

  • Data in platform database
  • No AI governance
  • No status gate enforcement
  • No cost tracking
  • No audit trail for AI
  • No offline PM

Joy

  • Text files in your git repo
  • AI members with capabilities
  • Cryptographic identity
  • Append-only event log
  • CLI-first, fully offline
  • Open source (MIT)

Governance in action

AI members with defined capabilities, interaction modes, and a workflow that enforces trust boundaries.

joy project
joy project output showing members with capabilities, AI tools, and workflow gates

Your repo is the database

Human-readable text files, git history, terminal commands. Full data sovereignty, no vendor lock-in.

Text Files in Git

Every item is a human-readable, diffable text file in .joy/. Version-controlled, branchable, fully offline. No database.

.joy/items/*.yaml

AI as Team Members

Register Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Qwen, or Mistral Vibe as project members with defined capabilities and delegation tokens.

joy ai setup

Event Log

Every action, human or AI, is logged with timestamp, actor, and details. Git-committed, append-only, auditable.

.joy/logs/

Capabilities

11 capabilities across lifecycle and management. Restrict what AI members can do. Management stays with humans.

--capabilities "implement,review"

Cryptographic Identity

Passphrase-derived keys for humans. Delegation tokens for AI. Every action is attributable.

joy auth init

CLI-first

Board, roadmap, backlog, milestones, releases, dependencies. All from the terminal. Shell completions included.

joy add story "Fix login"
joŷ

Joyint

Q3 2026

Ready for your team? Joyint adds sync, web UI, notifications, and E2E encryption to Joy. Bring your own GitHub, GitLab, or Gitea.

Join the waitlist

Start in 30 seconds

Joy lives in your repo. No account, no server, no configuration. Open source, MIT licensed, free forever. Built at Joydev for our own safety-critical, industrial-grade projects, and shared so the best tools get better when everyone contributes.

$ cargo install joy-cli && joy init
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