Beads — the versioned issue ledger under Gas Town

• Source: https://github.com/steveyegge/beads (sent by me, 2026-09-04)
• Verdict: promote-to-dev
• Why: Beads is the load-bearing data layer under Gas Town — the city you install to run 30 coding agents — its beads are the units of work the Mayor slings to polecats. On its own it's a clean idea worth filing: replace markdown plans and MEMORY.md files with a dependency-aware issue graph agents can query, claim, and merge. Promoted to dev on architecture, not on running it.

Filed to: Beads — Dolt-backed issue memory for coding agents

What it is

Beads is Steve Yegge's open-source issue tracker built for AI coding agents, shipped as a single CLI (bd). The pitch is that agents lose their place in long-horizon work because task state lives in markdown plans and memory files — prose that doesn't merge, block, or survive a restart. Beads replaces that with a dependency-aware issue graph stored in Dolt, a version-controlled SQL database.

The workflow is deliberately small: bd create "Fix auth bug" makes a bead with a content-hash ID (bd-a1b2), bd ready lists work with no open blockers, bd update <id> --claim atomically assigns it, bd dep add links blockers and parents, bd close releases what was blocked. Hierarchical IDs (bd-a3f8.1.1) give it epics and sub-tasks for free.

Notable: the repo at steveyegge/beads now redirects to gastownhall/beads — like Gas Town itself it has folded into Yegge's gastownhall org — with docs at beads.gascity.com.