When I was begging to work on long horizon ideas, I started on Linear, but my agent files issues faster than a human does, and I hit their limits and pricing wall almost immediately. Then I self-hosted a popular open source tracker which meant running its 13 containers, and its MCP integration was 30k tokens and I got so fed up that I eventually removed it and went back to .md files for a few weeks.
Lific is the opposite shape of most of your self hosted server issue trackers: It's a single Rust binary that uses SQLite, and it has an optimized MCP server built in. Web UI is also included integrated directly into the binary.
The simplicity is meant to only apply to the size and the ease of installation. The web UI is fully fleshed out with all of the UX you would expect from an issue tracker like linear.
Since I started using lific, my agent flow is that I open the web UI, find a few issues I want to work on, then tell the agent "work on LIF-298, 299 and 301, and if you find bugs, file them as new issues." At the end of the day the project has tracked itself. Issues have statuses, blockers, and comment threads, so "what's workable right now" is a query instead of the agent guessing. Plans are persisted step trees, so a session tomorrow resumes with the same understanding of the goal and the path as the session that made the plan. My largest project has 300+ issues and 100+ docs and agents search it fast. Everything exports to markdown in one click, and the database is just a file on your machine.
Setup is ` cargo install ` ` lific init ` ` lific connect `
then pick your harness (OpenCode, Cursor, Claude Code, etc). One honest caveat: on Windows there's no service install yet, so the binary has to be actively running for MCP or Web UI to work on windows.
The biggest reason I think Lific is different than a lot of the other options is the lightweight nature of it alongside still having a fully featured web UI. It's meant for self hosters to work on big projects with agents, without sacrificing the other benefits of an issue tracker like a nice management UI or authentication for teams using it.
Would genuinely love feedback and bug reports either here or on the discord!