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Epic timeline too long for AI workflows

John Small_yd1xfa

The minimum time for an epic in Jira timeline seems to be 5 days. That's based on the old stone age way of working when humans wrote the code. The new LLMs way of doing things reduces an epic that might have taken 5 days into a few minutes or a few hours. It's still useful to have epics to group tickets together, but the timelines are completely mismatched to the way we work these days.

I could have massive epics that genuinely would take 5 days even with AI writing the code, or make the minimum duration for an epic much smaller.

What do people think?

Accepted answers

John Funk

Hi John - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

It is not true that Epics have a minimum timeline of 5 days. You can have a start and end/due date on the same day or two days, etc. Can you provide some screenshots where you are getting an error with the minimum timeframe?

All comments

Tomislav Tobijas

Hey @John Small ,

When you say 'minimum time for an Epic' - are you referring to adding dates manually (either via work item itself or via timeline drag & drop functionality) or maybe referring to AI setting these start and due dates? 👀

I've just tried the timeline and using drag & drop method to set the value on the Epic, and you can set it to be anywhere from 1 to 100+ days in duration.

Also, the counter question could be: if we're talking about 1-2 days of implementation for something that's classified as Epic, does it really need to be an Epic, or could it be transformed into some other type (e.g., Story)? 🤔

I agree that with AI today, you can ship things much more quickly, but it could also mean that Epics would contain more 'tasks,' basically making them bigger chunks of projects than they used to be.

Cheers,
Tobi

John Funk

Hi John - Welcome to the Atlassian Community!

Yura_j5bbfq

Good point, actually, I've just discovered that min 5 days limit is applied when you in "Monthly" view which makes sense to me.

Screenshot 2026-04-20 at 10.13.52.png

Welcome to the community @John Small , I think Jira is quite clever here, if you look at "Weeks" timeline, it lets you have an epic 1 day long, but from "Months" view it sets a minimum of 5 days, most likely because the mouse control precision won't be good UX.

Tomislav Tobijas

The default behavior for me is:

Weeks: 7 days
Months: 14 days
Quarters: 30 days

It could be the same system (or board) settings related to this, but you should still be able to use the drag & drop option and even set it to 1 day if you like (even in 'Quarters' view)

John Small_yd1xfa

I switched to week view and then I could adjust the time line. The alternative is to edit the start and end dates in the right hand panel.

With AI although timelines are compressed, it is still useful to group stories into epics. They're still a block of work.

My workflow is to /compact the LLM cli that's writing the code when an epic completes. that keeps context open within an epic, and compacts it before moving on to the next epic

John Funk

@John Small - glad you found a good solution there.

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