Beads

What it does

Beads is a tool for managing tasks and issues, designed to streamline organization and enhance workflow. It provides Git-backed issue tracking with dependency awareness, making it ideal for agent task management. Beads allows you to create, update, close, list, and view details of issues, as well as manage dependencies between them.

When to use it

• Managing a backlog of tasks in a project.
• Tracking bugs and feature requests.
• Organizing work with parent-child relationships (epics and subtasks).
• Visualizing task dependencies and blockers.
• Keeping track of progress on individual issues.

Key capabilities

• Issue Creation: Create new tasks, bug reports, features, epics, chores, etc., with descriptions, priorities, and parent-child relationships.
• Dependency Management: Define dependencies between issues (blocks, related, parent-child).
• Status Updates: Update issue status (e.g., in_progress) and add notes to track progress.
• Issue Listing & Filtering: List open or closed issues, filtered by type, assignee, label, or priority.
• Git Integration: Syncs with a Git repository for version control of issues.

Example prompts

• "Show me the issues that are ready to work on."
• "Create a new task titled 'Implement User Login' with high priority and assign it to John."
• "List all open bugs assigned to Sarah, sorted by priority."

Tips & gotchas

• Requires installation of beads via cargo install beads.
• The skill uses JSON output for most commands; ensure your agent can handle this format.
• Dependencies are a core feature - use them to clearly define relationships between tasks.