Beads – A memory upgrade for your coding agent

Summary

bd - Beads Issue Tracker 🔗 Give your coding agent a memory upgrade 🎉 v0.20.1: Multi-Worker Support Unlocked! 🎉 Hash-based IDs eliminate merge conflicts and collision issues! Previous versions used sequential IDs (bd-1, bd-2, bd-3...) which caused frequent collisions when multiple agents or branches created issues concurrently. Version 0.20.1 switches to hash-based IDs (bd-a1b2, bd-f14c, bd-3e7a...) that are collision-resistant and merge-friendly. What's new: ✅ Multi-clone, multi-branch, multi-agent workflows now work reliably What changed: Issue IDs are now short hashes instead of sequential numbers Migration: Run bd migrate to upgrade existing databases (optional - old DBs still work) Hash IDs use progressive length scaling (4/5/6 characters) with birthday paradox math to keep collisions extremely rare while maintaining human readability. See "Hash-Based Issue IDs" section below for details. ⚠️ Alpha Status: This project is in active development. The core features work well, but expect API changes before 1.0. Use for development/internal projects first. Beads is a lightweight memory system for coding agents, using a graph-based issue tracker. Four kinds of dependencies work to chain your issues together like beads, making them easy for agents to follow for long distances, and reliably perform complex task streams in the right order. Drop Beads into any project where you're using a coding agent, and you'll enjoy an instant upgrade in organization, focus, and your agent's ability to handle long-horizon tasks over multiple compaction sessions. Your agents will use issue tracking with proper epics, rather than creating a swamp of rotten half-implemented markdown plans. Instant start: curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveyegge/beads/main/scripts/install.sh | bash Then tell your coding agent to start using the bd tool instead of markdown for all new work, somewhere in your AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md . That's all there is to it! You don't use Beads directly as a ...