Beads

Beads by Steve Yegge is an issue tracker built for AI-supervised coding workflows. Issues live as JSONL in .beads/ inside your repo and sync through git, giving agents persistent, mergeable memory across sessions and parallel workers — fixing the '50 First Dates' problem where every session starts blank. Dependencies are first-class (blocks, depends-on, parent-child), and bd update --claim gives multi-agent claim semantics so concurrent agents don't grab the same task. The bd CLI is tool-agnostic and complements Claude Code's in-session tasks with durable cross-session state.

The honest picture: it's genuinely useful for long-running agent work, but it adds process overhead — Yegge's own guidance says keep the DB small (under ~200–500 issues) and run bd doctor regularly. A Rust rewrite (br) and a Tauri desktop app exist for humans who want visibility into what agents are doing. MIT licensed.

brew install beads (or build from source), then bd init in your repo. Agents use bd create/list/show/update/close with --json; run bd sync at session end.