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role: Disciple · Husband · Father · Developer
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My Thoughts on Beads

#ai #tech

Steve Yegge is a pretty well-known individual in the tech field, having been around for a long time at some of the larger companies. He's making quite a splash in the agentic coding world as well. I've appreciated Steve's posts and projects lately and wanted to put some thoughts on one called beads.

Beads

Beads is an issue tracker with links - issues relate to and block each other, but agents use beads to keep track of information and dependencies without storing it in their context 100% of the time. It seems like a very popular and useful tool - but I am not using it, and that's what I wanted to capture... why not?

The answer for me is about where the organization layer is for the developer. Beads exists in a single repo - it's a system-wide CLI but you 'bd init' in a git repo, and beads uses the .git/ folder, worktrees, dolt, and some git hooks to operate within that git repo. Outside the repo, it takes another tool to tie together all the beads databases you might have.

For me, I'm hardly "in" a git repo anymore. My workflow is that when I have something to work on, I create a "workspace" (self-defined concept) which is just a folder on my filesystem where I check-out git worktrees from any of the repos related to the work I'm doing. Sometimes it's 1 worktree from 6 repos, sometimes it's 6 worktrees from 1 repo for parallel work...

So because I like to organize myself in this way, beads is already "out" for me. That's the main reason - I don't have any real technical issues with beads or any criticism, it just is designed for a workflow that is not how I work.

This is why I'm building nexus, something I hope to be able to put out there "soon". It won't be as general-purpose as beads, but my goal with it is to be plug-and-play for any agentic harness (copilot cli, claude code, opencode, etc.). It's a challenge thinking about it as a personal tool but also as a tool to share someday, but agentic coding is making it possible to make some cool shareable stuff and I'm excited for my own workflow-task-manager to mature and at least become something useful to me (it already is, but building the plane in the air makes it kind of hard to enjoy the plane).

Credit

  • banner image from ChatGPT