If your team uses Linear, you already have an opinion about how issues should look. Sharp. Fast. Keyboard-first. The last thing you want is a time tracker that asks you to rebuild your task hierarchy somewhere else just so you can record the hours.
Ayron's Linear integration is built on the assumption that Linear is the source of truth for what you're working on, and Ayron's job is to be the source of truth for how long it took — without the two ever fighting over the data.
What gets connected
You connect your own Linear account via OAuth. Ayron asks for a single read scope. That's enough to:
- List the Linear teams you belong to.
- Pull your assigned issues across those teams.
- Resolve issue metadata (title, status, project, team) for the picker and for any timer entries you start.
There is no write scope. Ayron does not move issues between statuses, comment on issues, or change assignees. The shape of the integration is deliberately read-only — more on why below.
The daily workflow
Setup. From your Ayron workspace, open Integrations and click Connect Linear. You're handed to Linear's OAuth screen. Approve. You're back in Ayron.
Map projects (optional, admin-only). If your workspace admin wires up an Ayron-project-to-Linear-project (or team) mapping, the timer picker becomes context-aware: when you're scoped to "Acme — Q3 rebuild" in Ayron, the picker prioritizes Linear issues from the mapped Linear project.
Start a timer. Open the picker. Search by issue identifier (ENG-1234) or by title. Your Linear issues appear inline with your Ayron tasks. Pick one. Timer running. Behind the scenes, Ayron creates or reuses an Ayron task linked to the Linear issue, so the time entry has somewhere to live and can be reported on like any other Ayron entry.
End of week. Run an AI weekly summary. Generate an invoice. Check estimate vs actual. The hours tracked against Linear issues participate in all of it.
Why Linear maps cleanly to Ayron's model
Two design choices in Ayron's data model happen to align well with Linear's:
User-owned tasks. Ayron's tasks are scoped per user. A task is something you are working on. Linear's assignment model is the same — assignee is a single user. So "your assigned Linear issues" → "your Ayron tasks" maps without forcing.
Shared projects. Ayron projects are shared workspace artifacts. The Ayron-to-Linear project mapping is set up once by an admin and used by everyone on the team. That means the workspace gets the benefit of context-aware filtering without each engineer re-configuring on their own.
The result: when an admin maps Ayron: Acme Rebuild → Linear: ACME team and you start a timer with the Ayron project preselected, the picker already knows to surface your assigned ACME issues. You're three keystrokes from a timer.
Why read-only
Ayron deliberately does not push timer events back into Linear. No "issue closed because timer stopped." No "estimate updated because tracked hours exceeded it." No status changes triggered by the timer.
The reason is operational, not technical. Linear is where your team coordinates. The cost of a buggy sync mutating Linear state — even occasionally — is much higher than the cost of having to close an issue with the Linear keyboard shortcut after stopping the timer. Engineering teams have rituals around issue state. Ayron's job is to respect them, not to overwrite them with timer side effects.
If two-way sync is something you specifically need, tell us — but the bar for adding it is high precisely because the failure mode is "your team's issue tracker disagrees with itself."
How it stays in sync
Linear's API is the cleanest of the external task systems we've integrated:
- Webhooks for fast updates when an issue is created, reassigned, or moved between states.
- GraphQL queries kept narrow, because Linear's API charges by complexity points and we'd rather use that budget on responsiveness than depth.
- Refresh token rotation following Linear's 2026-04-01 refresh token model — Ayron will refresh transparently when your session needs it.
You should never have to think about any of this. If you do, something's wrong and we want to hear about it.
What this unlocks
Like the Asana integration, the Linear integration is the on-ramp. The real value is what tracked time can become once it's inside Ayron:
- AI weekly summaries that read engineering work as it happened, not as it was remembered on Friday afternoon.
- Invoices for agencies and contractors billing client engineering hours — roll up tracked time by Linear team or by mapped project.
- Estimate vs actual margin tracking so you can see in real time whether the work that seemed like a 40-hour sprint is actually a 60-hour sprint. The estimate-vs-actual guide covers this in detail.
For agencies running Linear on behalf of clients, the combination of Linear-tracked engineering hours → Ayron invoice → branded payment link → reconciliation is the workflow that justifies the integration in the first place.
Current status
The Linear integration is in early access. The code is shipped; the release flag is off for new workspaces by default. If you want in, email hello@ayron.app with the workspace name and a one-line note about how your team uses Linear.
The plan is to open it more broadly once we've stress-tested the webhook + token refresh paths against teams larger than the dev team.
FAQ
Does the integration cover Linear projects, cycles, or just issues? Issues are the unit you time against. Projects and teams are how the picker filters and prioritizes. Cycles aren't part of the MVP — if cycle-based reporting is important to your team, let us know.
What about Linear's sub-issues? Sub-issues appear as their own rows in the picker — you time against the leaf, not the parent.
Does Ayron see my private Linear data?
Ayron requests read scope and only queries the data it needs to power the picker and the linked-issue display. Token storage is encrypted; Ayron's data retention policy applies the same way it does to your tracked time.
What about Asana? There's a parallel Asana integration with the same shape — read-first, timer-focused, per-user OAuth, optional workspace-level project mapping.
Can I disconnect? Yes. Disconnecting revokes the OAuth token and stops webhook delivery. Tracked time entries stay in your Ayron workspace; the link back to the original Linear issue becomes dormant.