What it actually looks like to start and finish a ticket by hand, step by step, and why it's easy to skip steps.
Before I wrote Jitly this is what starting a ticket looked like for me, and probably for most of you too: open Jira in a browser tab, find the ticket, copy the ID, alt-tab to terminal, git checkout main, git pull, then try to remember what branch naming convention we agreed on three months ago in a Slack thread nobody can find anymore.
Then you do the actual work. Then it's commit time and you either forget to put the ticket ID in the message or you copy it wrong. Push. Alt-tab back to Jira. Find the ticket again. Drag it to the right column, or worse, someone else has to do that for you because you forgot.
What actually goes wrong doing this by hand
Branch names drift — feature/, feat/, ABC-123-, abc123_, all four exist in the same repo somehow
Tickets sit in "In Progress" for days after the work is actually done, because moving them is a separate mental step
Commit messages don't reference the ticket, so nobody can trace a bug back to the ticket that introduced it
None of this is because people are lazy, it's just extra steps that are easy to skip when you're focused on the actual code.
Verdict: the manual way works fine for a solo project. On a team, the small inconsistencies pile up fast, and that's exactly the gap Jitly fills.