Inspecting Jira Issues for AI Agents

Overview

A Jira summary is the worst way to understand a bug. The actual repro almost always lives in attachments, comments, or linked issues — three places acli jira workitem view does not show by default. An AI agent that "works from the summary" guesses at half the problem.

This skill is the standard recipe for reading a Jira ticket completely from the command line, and for downloading attachment bytes that the agent can actually view (the non-obvious part — acli has no attachment download subcommand).

When to Use

• You just opened a Jira URL and are about to start fixing
• The description is image-20260427-021811.png with no text
• An agent says "I'll work from the summary" or "can you paste the screenshot"
• curl returns 401/403/406 against the Jira REST API

Don't use for sparse tickets with no attachments and no linked issues — acli jira workitem view KEY is enough.

Inspection workflow