update

update is a command for coding agents from gastownhall/beads. It costs 11 tokens per session (212 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A command for changing fields on a Beads issue, such as its status, priority, assignee, title, or description. Beads is an issue tracker for coding work involving AI agents.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to claim work, mark an issue blocked or completed, change its priority, assign it to someone, or edit its title and description.
Why use it?
It provides one way to record task progress and ownership without confusing issue details with comments, which are kept as a separate discussion thread.

Command

Part of the beads plugin — 29 commands, 1 agent, 4 hooks shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add commands/gastownhall/beads/update
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gastownhall/beads

Or install beads, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 29 commands, 1 agent, 4 hooks.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for update

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/gastownhall/beads/update.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/commands/gastownhall/beads/update)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/commands/gastownhall/beads/update"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/commands/gastownhall/beads/update.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 11 Only the description is in the session, so the agent can decide to use it. The body loads when it is invoked.
When invoked 212 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00011 $0.00212
Opus 5 $0.00005 $0.00106
Sonnet 5 $0.00002 $0.00042
Haiku 4.5 $0.00001 $0.00021

Measured 4d ago against content hash 34896bde7871, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

update scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 4d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

  • update — 100% identical, 2 lines differ
plugins/beads/skills/beads/commands/update.md · 25 lines

What it actually says

Update a beads issue.

If arguments are provided:

  • $1: Issue ID
  • $2: New status (open, in_progress, blocked, closed)

If arguments are missing, ask the user for:

  1. Issue ID
  2. What to update (status, priority, assignee, title, description)
  3. New value

Use the beads MCP update tool to apply the changes. Show the updated issue to confirm the change.

Note: Comments are managed separately with bd comments add. The update command is for singular, versioned properties (title, status, priority, etc.), while comments form a discussion thread that's appended to, not updated.

Common workflows:

  • Start work: bd update <id> --claim (atomic claim + in_progress)
  • Mark blocked: Update status to blocked
  • Reprioritize: Update priority (0-4)
Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 25 lines · 11 tokens per session scan A 34896bde7871

Subscribe to this mod's changes

update is a command published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/beads (26,853 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 11 tokens to every session and 212 once invoked, about $0.0001 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.