Turn a Jira issue into a plan. Let AI draft it. Read it in Confluence.

1 Why VibePlan

Every issue needs a plan, but writing a good one — phased, specific, with a realistic estimate — takes time most teams don't have. VibePlan takes a different path: press one button on the Jira issue, and an AI agent drafts the plan for you, published straight to Confluence.

How it compares

VibePlan sits between an empty Confluence page and a planning meeting — and sidesteps the usual trade-offs of each.

Who it's for

• Product managers & analysts who want a phased plan and an effort estimate from a requirement, without writing it from scratch.
• Engineers & tech leads who want an AI starting point — codebase-aware when they run their own agent — instead of an empty page.
• Delivery & project managers who want a human-day and AI-day estimate on every issue for planning and prioritisation.
• Security-conscious teams who, on a paired Mac, keep the drafting on their own machine (see Security & privacy).

2 How VibePlan works

VibePlan has a Jira app where you generate and review plans, and two ways to do the AI drafting: Rovo AI inside Atlassian's cloud (no setup), or your own AI agent on a paired Mac via the small desktop app.

Two ways to draft a plan

The end-to-end flow

When you press Generate Plan on an issue, here is what happens:

What you need

• A Jira Cloud site with the VibePlan by AppDash app installed (ask your Jira admin if you don't see the panel on issues).
• A Confluence space you can add pages to — VibePlan publishes each plan there (see Choose a Confluence space).
• Optional, for your own agent: a Mac with the desktop app and an AI coding agent (Claude Code by default). Without these, VibePlan uses Rovo AI.

The rest of this guide goes in order: pick a space, generate and review a plan with Rovo, then (optionally) pair your Mac to use your own agent.

3 Choose a Confluence space

VibePlan publishes every plan as a Confluence page, so the one piece of setup it needs is which space to publish into. You set it once per project, on the VibePlan settings page — alongside the AI agent and (optionally) the Rovo guidance.

1. Open the VibePlan settings page. In Jira, go to Project settings → Apps → VibePlan by AppDash. This is also where you pair a desktop and pick your AI agent.
2. Pick a Confluence space. Under Confluence space, choose a space from the dropdown — it lists the spaces you can add pages to, shown as “Space name (KEY)”. This is where every plan for this project gets published.

   

3. Save. Click Save settings. A Saved lozenge confirms it, with a “Last saved … by …” line. Until a space is saved, the Generate Plan button on issues stays disabled.

What else is on this page

• AI agent — which agent profile drafts the plans, when a Mac is paired. Leave it as the default if you're using Rovo (see Generate a plan).
• Rovo AI guidance — an optional text box that tunes how Rovo drafts plans when no desktop is paired. It comes pre-filled with a sensible default; edit it only if you want to steer the style or emphasis. (The output format is fixed; this only changes the guidance.)
• Paired devices — the desktops paired to this project, and where you pair a new one (see Pair your Mac with Jira).

4 Generate a plan

Plans live on Jira issues. Every issue gets a VibePlan panel where you generate, review, and track plans for that piece of work.

Open the VibePlan panel on an issue

Once your Jira admin has installed the app, each issue gains a VibePlan panel. Open any Jira issue and scroll down, past the description and fields, to find it. On an issue with no plan yet, it invites you to generate your first one.

Press Generate Plan

Click Generate Plan. VibePlan reads this issue's summary and description (plus linked Jira and Confluence context) and hands them to the AI. What happens next depends on whether a Mac is paired:

With no Mac paired — Rovo AI

If no desktop is paired to the project, VibePlan offers to draft the plan with Rovo AI — Atlassian's hosted AI — right inside Jira. A short confirm explains the choice:

Click Generate with Rovo AI and the plan is drafted and published in a few seconds, entirely inside Atlassian. Rovo sees only the issue's text — it has no access to your codebase.

With a Mac paired — your own agent

If a desktop is paired and an agent profile is selected, Generate Plan dispatches the job straight to your Mac, where your AI agent drafts the plan. This path can read your project files (when a working directory is set) for a more grounded plan. See Pair your Mac with Jira to set this up.

Watch it draft

While the plan is being written, the panel shows a live status card:

• Queued — planning… with the note “This usually takes a few minutes.”
• Drafting your implementation plan with AI… — once the agent picks it up, with a live elapsed timer ticking beside it (and the agent's name, e.g. Running on Claude Code).
• A Stop button is available throughout — click it to cancel the generation (the plan is marked stopped, and on a paired Mac the underlying agent is halted).

5 Review your plan

When drafting finishes, the panel shows a Plan ready card with everything you need: a link to the Confluence page, the two effort estimates, and the actions to open, refine, or replace the plan.

What's on the card

• The plan title — a link (with a document glyph) that opens the generated Confluence page in a new tab. Middle-click or ⌘-click to copy the link.
• Two effort tiles — Human effort (developer calendar-days) and AI effort (the days an AI agent can accelerate), each shown as {n} d. The same two numbers are written onto the issue's own fields.
• Actions — Open plan (the Confluence page), Regenerate (redraft in place), New plan (draft another alongside this one), and Delete.
• A Generated with Rovo AI note appears when the plan was drafted by Rovo rather than your own agent.

The published Confluence page

Click Open plan to read the full plan in Confluence. Every generated page includes:

• A generation-info header — an info panel noting the plan was generated by AI, the date, and a link back to the Jira issue. It's a reminder to review the plan before relying on it.
• Phased sections — typically three to five phases, each with a one-line purpose, a short task list, and an acceptance criterion. Code snippets render as proper Confluence code macros.
• An overall effort line — the human-day and AI-day totals, matching the tiles on the panel.
• A link back to the issue — the plan is added to the Jira issue's Web links, so the issue and its plan always point at each other.

6 Manage your plans

A single issue can have more than one plan over its life — an early draft, a refined version, an alternative. VibePlan keeps them all in a plan history, and gives you three ways to move a plan forward.

Regenerate — refine in place

Click Regenerate on a ready plan to redraft it. VibePlan reads any comments on the Confluence page and incorporates that feedback, then replaces the existing page in place (the link stays the same). A short confirm explains it:

“Regenerate this plan? Comments on the Confluence page will be incorporated if present. The existing page will be replaced.”

It's the natural loop: read the draft, leave comments where it's wrong, regenerate, repeat. (With no Mac paired, regeneration runs through Rovo AI and the confirm says so.)

New plan — draft another alongside

Click New plan to generate a separate plan without replacing the current one — useful for an alternative approach or a fresh take. Both plans stay in the history with their own Confluence pages.

Plan history

Below the active plan, the Plan history lists every plan generated on this issue — newest first.

• A status lozenge — completed, running, failed, or queued / cancelled.
• The plan's title, which links to its Confluence page when one was published.
• A relative timestamp (just now, 2m ago, 1d ago).
• A delete (✕) control to remove that entry from the history.

Delete a plan

Delete removes a plan from VibePlan's tracking on the issue after a confirmation. Importantly, the published Confluence page is kept — deleting only stops VibePlan from tracking it here:

“Delete this plan and start over? This removes the plan and its Plan-history entry from this issue. The published Confluence page is kept — it just won't be tracked here anymore. You'll return to the Generate Plan form.”

7 Install the desktop app optional

You can use VibePlan with Rovo AI alone — no install. Install the free AppDash AI Link desktop app when you want plans drafted by your own AI agent, on your own machine, with access to your codebase.

1. Download the app. Open appdash.ai/download and download the latest macOS build (a .dmg file). You'll also find this link inside Jira — on the VibePlan settings page and in the panel's setup note (Download →).
2. Install it. Open the .dmg and drag AppDash AI Link into your Applications folder, then launch it. On first launch macOS may ask you to confirm you want to open an app downloaded from the internet — choose Open.
3. Find it in your menu bar. AppDash AI Link lives in your Mac's menu bar and opens a single window with four tabs: Connections, Activity, Console, and Settings. It opens on the Connections tab.

The desktop app is shared across AppDash products — if you already use it for VibeTest, you're already set up, and the same pairing works for VibePlan.

8 Pair your Mac with Jira

Pairing links one Jira site to your desktop app, so plans you generate in Jira can run on your Mac. You do it once per site, across two windows — the VibePlan settings page in Jira and the desktop app — confirming a short code on both so nobody can pair without your approval. Jira walks you through four stages: Generate → Send to desktop → Confirm → Connected.

1. Open the VibePlan settings page in Jira. Go to Project settings → Apps → VibePlan by AppDash. The Paired devices section lists any desktops already paired to this project, and is where you pair a new one.
2. Generate the pairing link in Jira. Click Pair AppDash AI Link. Jira advances to Send to desktop and shows a short user code (note it — you'll check it in step 4) and a Copy pair link button. Click Copy pair link.
3. Paste the link into the desktop app. Switch to AppDash AI Link. On the Connections tab, click + Add Connection, paste the link into the box, and click Pair this device.

   

4. Check that the codes match. The desktop now shows “Pairing in progress” with the same user code plus an app fingerprint. Confirm the user code matches the one Jira showed in step 2 — this is the security check that proves you're pairing the right machine.

   

5. Confirm in Jira — you're connected. Back on the Jira page, with the codes matching, click Confirm pairing. The tracker advances to Connected, and the desktop's Connections tab shows the new site under Sites with a green Polling dot. Your Mac is now listening for plan jobs from that site.

9 Use the desktop app

Most of the time AppDash AI Link just runs quietly in your menu bar. When you want to check on it, its four tabs cover connections, generation history, low-level logs, and settings.

Connections — your paired sites

The Connections tab (shown in section 7) lists every paired Jira site under Sites, each as a card with a live status dot. Expand a card for its actions:

• Test — run a quick connectivity check against that site.
• Jobs — jump to the Activity tab filtered to this site.
• Network log — jump to the Console tab filtered to this site.
• Pause / Resume — temporarily stop (or restart) listening for that site.
• Remove — unpair the site and delete its locally stored tokens (this can't be undone — you'd re-pair to reconnect).

Activity — your generation history

The Activity tab is a searchable table of everything this Mac has run — including every plan it has drafted: when it started, its status, who triggered it, the issue, and how long it took (a Source column also appears once you have more than one connection). Click a row for the full detail, including the agent's transcript. While a generation is still in progress, open it and click Stop to cancel it — the plan is stopped and recorded as cancelled in Jira. Use Clear Log to empty the table.

Console — the technical log

The Console tab is for diagnosing problems. It has three sub-views in a left list: Network log (the app's HTTP calls to Jira, agent subprocess launches, and pairing messages — colour-coded by success or error; routine background “heartbeat” polls are hidden by default, use the Show menu to reveal them; click a row to inspect the full request and response, or a job's launch to read its conversation), Audit log (the server-side security ledger for your Atlassian connections — pairings, token rotations, scope checks), and Events (a local record of actions on this Mac — pausing/resuming connections, settings changes, sleep/wake).

Settings — agents and preferences

The Settings tab opens on Agents, where you choose and configure the agent that drafts your plans.

• Default agent — the agent used for any job that doesn't pin its own (Claude Code out of the box). Click Set as default agent on a healthy agent to switch.
• Profiles — each agent ships with a built-in Default profile and can have any number of named profiles. The VibePlan settings page in Jira pins a named profile by name; the Default runs otherwise.
• Add custom agent — point AppDash AI Link at any coding-agent CLI (name, command, output format, launch template).
• Open a profile (the › arrow) to configure it: its binary (auto-detected, Re-detect, or Browse), an optional working directory (blank = a fresh sandbox each run; a real path lets the agent read your project files for a codebase-aware plan), the launch command template, per-profile environment variables (which can be marked secret), advanced timeouts, a live command preview, and a Test connection button.

Other items in the Settings sidebar: Relay clients (pair an iPhone for read-only status checks — off by default), Project secrets (store API keys and credentials for your agent, kept write-only in your OS keychain), and About (version, update check, and the Forget me data-erasure wizard at the bottom).

10 Security & privacy

VibePlan is built so your most sensitive assets — source code, credentials, and customer data — stay under your control. This section summarises the architecture and controls a corporate security review typically asks about.

Where your data lives

There are only two places VibePlan keeps anything, and you own both — plus Confluence, where the finished plan lives as a page you control:

The two engines, and what each can see

Security controls at a glance

Atlassian permissions (scopes) the app requests

VibePlan asks for only what it needs to read the issue, publish the plan to Confluence, write the effort fields, and store its own data:

The Jira and Confluence side run on Atlassian's hosted runtime

The Atlassian side of VibePlan — the panels, resolvers, storage, and the Rovo AI drafting path — runs entirely inside Atlassian's hosted, sandboxed runtime, with per-tenant data isolation and Atlassian-managed encryption. (When you draft with your own agent, that execution happens on your Mac, not on Atlassian.) For Atlassian's platform certifications, sub-processors, and data-residency options, point your reviewers to the Atlassian Trust Center and the app's Marketplace listing.

Your responsibilities

• Protect the Mac. Anyone with access to a paired Mac can generate plans against the connected site. Use full-disk encryption (FileVault) and a screen lock.
• Mind the working directory. If you point a profile at a local repo for codebase-aware plans, the agent reads that code while drafting. Use a checkout you're comfortable handing to your agent.
• Review before relying. Plans are AI drafts. Read them — especially effort estimates and any risk notes — before treating them as commitments.

11 Troubleshooting

Most issues come down to the Confluence space, a connection that needs attention, or the desktop app not running. Start with the panel's own message — it usually tells you exactly what to fix.

Common problems

Connection statuses and what to do

Check the wiring: Test connection

To confirm your Mac can reach the AI agent, open Settings → Agents, select your agent profile, and click Test connection. It runs a tiny PONG prompt through the agent's full launch path. A “Ready ✓” result (with the round-trip time) means the desktop-to-agent link works; a “Failed” result points at an agent that isn't installed or configured — re-check the profile's command and binary path on the same screen.

Privacy: erase everything

Everything the desktop app stores on your Mac — connections, tokens, activity, and logs — lives there, not in the cloud. To wipe it all, open Settings → About → Forget me and confirm. This permanently deletes the local data and unpairs your sites.