🧑💻 Developer-First #163 - Developers most hated tools
Why developers hate JIRA and what it means for DevTool startups
Hello friend,
Each year, The Pragmatic Engineer survey is a goldmine of insights into what developers actually like, and more importantly, what they avoid at all costs. In 2025, one name stood out more than any other on the “most hated tools” list: JIRA.
Not just at the top, but so far ahead that it attracted more criticism than the next four tools combined. The complaints were familiar: it’s slow, complex, and painful to use. It’s clearly not designed for developers.
In contrast, Linear was consistently praised across responses as the ideal alternative: fast, intuitive, and built with the developer experience in mind. We’re seeing the same trend in other categories:
Teams stuck on Microsoft Teams dream of switching to Slack.
Those stuck with Confluence wish they could work in Coda.
At its core, developers are rejecting heavyweight tools built for middle management and gravitating toward lightweight, focused, and developer-first alternatives.
💡 And that’s the key takeaway for DevTools founders and their investors: winning in this space doesn’t always require a radically new category.
Sometimes, all it takes is out-executing incumbents on UX, performance, and developer experience, especially when you’re solving a problem everyone already agrees is painful.
The future of DevTools might not be built on disruption, but on respect for developers’ time, focus, and expectations.
P.S.: I’m going on a much-deserved summer break at the end of the week, so you won’t be hearing from me for the next two weeks ☀️
Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.
💰 Market Summary - Week of July 27th, 2025
4 companies raised $395 million across 3 product categories in 1 country.
North America-based companies attracted 100% of the total funding.
DevTool is the category that attracted the highest funding.
1 company provides or contributes actively to an open-source project.
0 company was acquired last week.
📈 Top 5 Weekly Share Price Movement
This week’s leader is MongoDB’s stock which grew +9% over the past 5 days, due to continued positive momentum following its recent strong quarterly earnings and upgraded guidance. As mentioned in a former edition, developers are less and less keen in using MongoDB and I believe we might see it reflected in the stock in the coming quarters.
🧩 Funding by Product Category
🌎 Funding by Region
100% North America
🏢 Funding By Company
Armada, from Cambridge 🇺🇸 raised $131 million in Series B funding led by Pinegrove Venture Partners, Veriten and Glade Brook. Armada is the first full-stack edge computing platform, delivering connectivity, compute, and AI solutions wherever they’re needed. (more)
HeroDevs, from Sandy 🇺🇸 raised $125 million in strategic growth funding led by PSG. HeroDevs provides enterprise support for deprecated open-source software, ensuring compliance and stability while letting developers focus on core priorities. (more)
Reka AI, from Sunnyvale 🇺🇸 raised $110 million in Series B funding from Nvidia and Snowflake. Reka is advancing generative AI through state-of-the-art research and products designed to push the boundaries of artificial intelligence. (more)
Composio, from San Francisco 🇺🇸 raised $29 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Composio enables AI agents to perform autonomous actions across hundreds of tools, powering the next generation of agentic workflows. (more)
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
No transactions last week
⭐️ Trending GitHub Repositories
OpenBB-finance / OpenBB (✩ 3,114 stars this week) - Investment Research for Everyone, Everywhere.
hesreallyhim / awesome-claude-code (✩ 2,434 stars this week) - A curated list of awesome commands, files, and workflows for Claude Code.
frappe / hrms (✩ 1,715 stars this week) - Open Source HR and Payroll Software.
👍 Trending Developer Tools on ProductHunt
Trickle - Magic Canvas (👍 932) - Trickle Magic Canvas - the world’s 1st agentic canvas where you can co-create with AI, visually, to ship production-ready apps & websites. It‘s a visual space for context engineering, where the agent better understands your intentions & builds multi-page apps.
Trae 2.0 (👍 447) - Trae 2.0 brings SOLO to everyone, which is your all-in-one Context Engineer that doesn’t just assist with code, but thinks, plans, builds, and ships complete features end-to-end, with the right information and tools.
Lovable Agent Mode (👍 435) - Lovable's new Agent Mode (Beta) lets your AI think, plan, and take action on its own. It explores code, fixes bugs, fetches resources, and summarises changes—all autonomously. Save time, reduce errors, and build smarter with AI that truly helps.