Linearlinear.app
Linear's API design and developer onboarding are strong, and documentation discoverability is excellent — partners can find the API without friction. However, the program has critical gaps in how its APIs communicate with AI agents and how safely those agents can operate in real workflows.
API DesignA clean, typed, well-governed API contract agents can reason about3 pass2 warn0 fail84A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Auth declared & discoverablevia spec | 25/25 | Authentication required (global or on every operation). Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%. | Agents can only authenticate when auth is declared, scoped, and discoverable. |
| warn | Machine-readable, versioned contractvia spec | 18.8/25 | info.version="1.0.0" set but no versioning scheme (URL / header / media type) detected. Investigated: spec 75%, docs 50%. | A current OpenAPI version with a declared versioning scheme lets agents reason about the contract. |
| pass | Security & governance hygienevia spec | 15/15 | No credential-shaped strings detected in spec. Investigated: spec 100%, wellknown 100%. | No leaked secrets, no critical lint violations, no OWASP API Top-10 spec smells, and a published vulnerability-disclosure channel. |
| warn | Schema coverage & depthvia spec | 12.5/25 | Only 0% of operations have documented schemas. Investigated: spec 50%, sdk 0%. | Typed, complete request/response schemas are what make agent function-calling possible. |
| pass | Example coveragevia docs | 10/10 | Code samples present on 4/20 pages across 1 language(s); broader multi-language coverage missing. Investigated: docs 100%, spec 0%, sdk 0%. | Examples carry shape semantics schemas under-specify — for humans and agents alike. |
Developer ExperienceThe context both developers and agents need to integrate fast — onboarding, code samples, complete descriptions and worked examples4 pass1 warn0 fail89A
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Self-service developer portalvia docs | 29/29 | Signup page at https://linear.app/signup; no free-tier language detected in docs/pricing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Self-serve key/account creation is the fast first call for partners, with no sales gate. |
| pass | Code samples in docsvia docs | 18/18 | Code samples present on 4/20 pages across 1 language(s); broader multi-language coverage missing. Investigated: docs 100%. | Multi-language samples shorten time-to-first-call. |
| pass | Description completenessvia spec | 15/15 | 100% of operations + parameters have substantive descriptions. Investigated: spec 100%. | Complete descriptions are the context humans and agents need to use endpoints. |
| pass | Changelog publishedvia spec | 13/13 | changelog documented in the docs site at https://linear.app/changelog. Investigated: spec 100%, docs 100%, sdk 100%. | A published changelog lets partners track changes without surprise. |
| warn | Quickstart presentvia docs | 12.5/25 | Quickstart page reachable (8 variants scanned starting at https://linear.app/quickstart) but no runnable code sample detected in HTML or .md variant. Investigated: docs 50%. | A quickstart is the fastest path from landing page to first successful call. |
Agent DiscoveryPartners and their agents can find your APIs — llms.txt, registries, crawlable and reachable docs2 pass2 warn0 fail90A+
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Registry & SDK presencevia docs | 28/28 | Indexed on Context7 (linear/linear, 669 snippets). Investigated: docs 100%, mcp 100%, sdk 88%, cli 0%, wellknown 0%. | Listing in MCP registries and publishing SDKs puts the API where agents and their tooling look. |
| warn | llms.txt present, valid & comprehensivevia docs | 26.3/30 | No llms.txt directive found in HTML of any of 27 pages. Investigated: docs 88%. | A valid, comprehensive llms.txt is the machine-readable entry point for agents. |
| warn | Docs reachable, not hard auth-gatedvia docs | 22.5/30 | 1 of 27 pages return 200 for non-existent URLs (soft 404). Investigated: docs 75%. | Agents can only index and fetch docs they can reach — past auth gates and over correct HTTP semantics. |
| pass | Crawlable / AEOvia wellknown | 12/12 | Docs paths crawlable by all monitored AI agents. Investigated: wellknown 100%. | Bots allowed plus a fresh sitemap make docs findable by agent crawlers. |
Agent UnderstandingAgents can correctly interpret your APIs — machine-readable errors, consistent descriptions, structured data, parseable docs1 pass2 warn3 fail58D
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| pass | Operation purpose clarityvia spec | 25/25 | 100% of operations have a clear summary + operationId an agent can select on. Investigated: spec 100%. | Agents select the right endpoint from its summary + operationId; clear, named operations make tool-selection reliable — the strongest driver of correct tool choice. |
| warn | Agent-navigable, token-efficient docsvia docs | 17.1/22 | 2 of 26 pages have substantive content differences between markdown and HTML (avg 10% missing). Investigated: docs 78%. | Server-rendered, clean, small-footprint docs are what an agent can cheaply fetch and parse correctly. |
| warn | Description consistency across surfaces | 2.1/7 | Mean pairwise description similarity across 3 surfaces (spec, docs, sdk) is 11% (threshold 35% for full credit). | Every surface tells the same story about what the product is. |
| fail | Machine-readable errors (RFC 9457)via spec | 0/28 | No 4xx/5xx response codes (or default error response) documented anywhere in the spec. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | RFC 9457 problem details and a documented error-code inventory let agents parse failures without burning tokens. |
| fail | Agent instructions file (AGENTS.md)via wellknown | 0/10 | No AGENTS.md at the site root or /.well-known/. Investigated: wellknown 0%. | An AGENTS.md gives coding agents explicit setup, auth, and usage instructions to interpret and operate the API — beyond llms.txt's link index. |
| fail | Docs structured datavia docs | 0/8 | Neither JSON-LD nor OpenGraph/meta tags detected across 3 assessed pages (3 JS-rendered). Investigated: docs 0%. | Structured data (JSON-LD/schema.org) on docs pages gives agents an unambiguous parse target and is what answer engines cite. Detected on the JS-rendered head (Firecrawl) for a bounded page budget, so JS-injected JSON-LD is now caught; pages we can't render are excluded rather than failed. |
Agent UsabilityAgents have the context to use your APIs reliably, not just find them0 pass1 warn3 fail41F
| Signal | Points | Findings | Rationale | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| warn | Runnable collection with test scriptsvia platform | 4.5/9 | No test scripts found in the workspace's collections. Investigated: platform 50%. | A public, maintained collection with assertions is runnable truth agents validate against. |
| fail | Idempotency documentedvia spec | 0/27 | 0% of mutating operations document idempotency. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Documented idempotency lets agents retry safely. |
| fail | Rate-limit signalingvia spec | 0/22 | No rate-limit response headers documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | Machine-readable rate-limit headers let agents throttle adaptively. |
| fail | Sandbox separationvia spec | 0/20 | No sandbox/test server declared across 1 server entries; no test-key prefixes documented. Investigated: spec 0%, docs 0%. | An isolated environment lets agents exercise destructive operations safely. |
| na | Pagination documented & consistent | —/22 | No surface produced evidence for this capability in this run. | Consistent, documented pagination lets agents traverse collections. |
Resources Discovered
The public resources we found for Linear — the evidence behind the score. All discovered from public sources; nothing here requires access to your systems.
| Agent hints | Context7 (669) |
|---|---|
| APIs analyzed | 1 — Linear GraphQL API |