The anti-roadmap: the features we will never ship

Every tracker publishes a roadmap. It is always a list of what is coming, which is the easy half of the story, because a roadmap of additions costs nothing to write. The hard half is the list of things a tool has decided it will never do, published in advance, in enough detail that you can hold it against them later.

This is that list for Radial. Not a mood, not a "we currently have no plans to." A named set of features we have committed to never shipping, and a stated penalty if we ship one anyway: the day Radial ships a copilot, meters your usage, or charges you for AI you didn't ask for, your subscription is free.

#Why a tracker needs an anti-roadmap

A roadmap tells you what a product wants to become. An anti-roadmap tells you what it refuses to become, which is the more useful thing to know when you are deciding whether to put five years of your team's work inside it.

The reason this matters right now is that the failure mode is no longer "the tool stops improving." It is "the tool improves into something else." You adopt a fast, focused tracker. Two funding rounds later it has a chat panel, a credit balance, and an invoice line you did not have last year. Nothing was taken away. Things were added, and the additions are the problem.

The demand for the opposite is real and easy to observe. Search "project management tool without AI" and the top result is a Reddit thread in r/projectmanagement titled "Non-AI PM Software," where people trade recommendations for tools that either have no AI or let you switch it off. Google's own People Also Ask box surfaces the question plainly: "What project management tools don't use AI?" That is a shopping query. People are actively looking for the tool that did not pivot.

You cannot answer that query credibly with a promise that is only a sentence long. So here is the list.

#The list: what Radial will never ship

Each of these is a real product decision with a real reason, not a swipe at anyone building them. Several are good features in other categories. They are wrong for a system of record.

#A copilot, a chatbot, or an "ask Radial" panel

No conversational surface between you and your issues. No "ask your workspace a question" box, no chat sidebar, no natural-language layer that sits in front of the list.

The reason is that a tracker's core value is being deterministic. When you filter for open issues assigned to you, you need the exact set, not a plausible set. The moment a language model mediates the query, the answer becomes probabilistic, and a system of record that is probabilistic is not a system of record. Your agent can absolutely reason over the data. It should do that on your side of the boundary, through the API, with your model and your keys.

#AI summaries of issues, comments, or activity

No auto-generated "here's what happened on this issue" block, no digest of a comment thread written by a model.

Summaries look free and are not. They cost per request to run, which is the root of every meter that ever showed up in a tool you already paid for. They also quietly become the thing people read instead of the thread, which means the record everyone trusts is a paraphrase. If you want a summary, your agent can read the issue over MCP and write you one, using tokens you already pay for.

#Auto-triage, auto-labeling, and auto-routing

No model guessing which team an incoming issue belongs to, what to label it, or who should own it.

Triage is a judgment call with real consequences, and a wrong guess is worse than no guess because it looks like a decision was made. Radial ships a triage queue you step through with single keystrokes, and an auto-assign rule that is plain deterministic logic, not a model. Your own agent is welcome to triage the queue through the MCP tools if you want that automated; the difference is that you chose it, you can read the rule, and nobody bills you per issue.

#Semantic or "smart" search sold as a feature

Search stays exact, local, and instant. Type an identifier like RAD-219 and you jump straight to it. Type words and you get full-text matches, not a ranked interpretation of what you might have meant.

This is the feature most often used to justify a meter, and it is the one where determinism matters most. Search is how you find the thing you already know exists.

#Agents as billed seats

No agent will ever count as a paid member seat. Every credential acts as a workspace member flagged as an agent, and those never enter the seat count. Run one agent or twenty; the seat math is the number of humans.

To be fair about the competitive picture: this is not a lonely position anymore. Linear has confirmed agents are not billed as seats there either, and other trackers have landed in the same place. So the differentiator is not the policy, it is the durability of it. Ours is written into a pledge with a penalty attached, rather than left as current pricing that a future pricing page can quietly revise.

#A metered AI credit system, or any AI surcharge

No credit pool, no token allowance, no "AI add-on," no usage line that varies month to month. One flat number.

This is the load-bearing one. The others are mostly about product shape; this one is about your bill. $50 per user, per year, flat, billed annually. Agents ride free. The rate you join at is the rate you keep.

#Anything that costs us per-request money to run on your behalf

This is the general rule the specific items fall out of, and it is the honest reason the list holds. A vendor that spends money every time you click something will eventually meter that click. It is not malice, it is arithmetic. By refusing to build features with a per-request cost, we remove the pressure that creates meters in the first place. The pledge is credible because the cost structure backs it, not because we are unusually principled.

#What is not on this list

An anti-roadmap is only honest if it also says what it does not cover, so two clarifications.

This is not anti-AI. It is the opposite of a stance against agents; the entire developer surface exists to serve them. Radial ships a 30-command CLI, a remote MCP server with 41 tools, a plain REST API, and OAuth 2.1, specifically so Claude Code, Codex, or whatever ships next week can file, groom, and close work directly. AI is redefining a lot of products. A tracker's job is to open fast, search instantly, and stay out of the way while your agent does the thinking. The line is not "no AI," it is "no AI we sell you and meter."

These are not the same as deferred features. Milestones, roadmap and timeline views, dashboards, presence, Slack, and email-in are not on the anti-roadmap. They are simply not built yet, and some may never be prioritized. That is an ordinary backlog, not a promise. The anti-roadmap is a narrower and stronger claim: these specific things are ruled out on purpose, and breaking that rule has a stated price.

#What makes this checkable rather than a slogan

Three mechanisms, and you can verify all of them today.

The penalty is stated, not implied. The pledge names the trigger conditions (a copilot, metered usage, or an AI charge you didn't ask for) and the consequence (your subscription is free). Vague promises are unfalsifiable, which is exactly why they are easy to make.

Your data leaves in one command. A pledge you cannot walk away from is worth very little, so full workspace export in JSON or CSV is always available, not a retention-team concession. Leaving is a command, not a support ticket.

The interfaces are open enough to route around us. Because the CLI, MCP server, and REST API expose the full issue lifecycle, you can build whatever intelligence you want on top without asking permission or waiting for us to ship it.

That last one is the practical answer to "what if I do want AI in my tracker?" You point your own agent at it. Here is the whole setup, using the CLI's stdio MCP server:

# 1. Authenticate the CLI to your workspace (device flow, no key to paste)
radial auth --workspace acme

# 2. Register Radial as an MCP server for your agent
claude mcp add radial -- radial mcp

# 3. Your agent now drives the tracker directly. From your side:
radial list --assignee me --status "in progress" --json

Your model, your keys, your bill. Radial's price does not move because your agent got busier.

#FAQ

#What project management tools don't use AI?

The honest answer is that "no AI at all" is getting rare, and most lists you find (Microsoft Project, Basecamp, and similar) are really lists of tools that have been slower to add it, which is a different and less durable property than a commitment. The more useful question is not whether a tool has AI features but whether it bills you for them and whether they sit between you and your data. Radial's version of the answer is specific: no AI surface in the product, your own agent fully supported through the CLI, MCP, and API, and a written penalty if that ever changes.

#Is an anti-roadmap just marketing?

It is marketing in the sense that we published it, and it is a commitment in the sense that it has a cost. The test is whether the promise is falsifiable and whether breaking it hurts. "We value focus" fails that test. "The day we ship a copilot, your subscription is free" passes it, because you can check the product against the list yourself.

#What if my team actually wants AI features in the tracker?

Then bring your agent, which is genuinely the better version of that want. Point Claude Code, Codex, or your own harness at the MCP server and it can file issues, groom the backlog, run triage, and close work with its own context and your keys. You get more capability than a built-in copilot would give you, on a model you chose, and your tracker bill stays the same number.

#Does this mean Radial never ships anything?

No. It ships continuously, in the tracker's actual job: speed, views, filters, Git integrations, Cycles, the CLI and MCP surface, Previews. The anti-roadmap constrains one axis, the AI surface and the metering that follows it. Everything else is normal product work. Boring on purpose is about the shape of the roadmap, not its pace.

#What happens if Radial gets acquired?

This is the fair skeptical question and it deserves a straight answer rather than a reassurance. A pledge binds the company that made it, and no blog post can bind a hypothetical future owner. What survives an ownership change is the export: your full workspace in JSON or CSV, one command, always available. That is why the export is part of the pledge and not a feature footnote. The commitment is real today and the exit is real permanently.

#The point

A roadmap asks you to trust a direction. An anti-roadmap gives you something to check. If you are picking a tracker your team will live in for years, the second one tells you more, because the risk with modern software is not that it stalls, it is that it drifts into a category you never wanted to buy.

The list above is the drift we have ruled out, with a price on it if we are wrong.

See the full pledge and what it commits us to in the manifesto. For how metered billing reached your tracker in the first place, read the meter you didn't sign up for; for the design stance underneath this list, boring on purpose. Pricing is one line: $50 per user, per year, flat, agents ride free.