What is beads AGENTS.md?

Repository instructions for contributors and coding agents working on Beads, a command-line issue tracker. They cover project scope, task tracking, development, testing, pull requests, and the visual style of command-line output.

Use them when developing Beads, running tests and checks, reviewing or landing pull requests, or deciding whether a proposed feature fits the project.

They explain the project rules an agent needs before changing code or maintaining contributions. This helps prevent unsupported features, unsafe pull-request handling, and inconsistent output.

beads AGENTS.md — Instructions file by gastownhall

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 instructions/gastownhall/beads/agents-md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gastownhall/beads

Made for: Codex, OpenCode.

Per session 2,901 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 2,901 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan C 1 finding. 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.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.02901	$0.02901
Opus 5	$0.01451	$0.01451
Sonnet 5	$0.00580	$0.00580
Haiku 4.5	$0.00290	$0.00290

Measured yesterday against content hash 5aa99bf25f08, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade C, and why

beads AGENTS.md scanned grade C with 1 finding 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 yesterday.

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.

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

rm -rf with a variable or a broad path is one typo away from removing the wrong tree.

rm -rf directory # NOT: rm -r directory

AGENTS.md · 291 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 291 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Agent Instructions

See AGENT_INSTRUCTIONS.md for full instructions.

This file exists for compatibility with tools that look for AGENTS.md.

The marker above tells bd doctor that the intentional divergence between this file and CLAUDE.md (different audiences, different reading orders) is expected and should not be flagged.

Key Sections

Issue Tracking - How to use bd for work management
Development Guidelines - Code standards and testing
Project Scope - Read engdocs/PROJECT_CHARTER.md before adding new feature surface area
Visual Design System - Status icons, colors, and semantic styling for CLI output
Contributor Protection - Read CONTRIBUTING.md before handling external PRs
Maintainer PR Guidelines - Read PR_MAINTAINER_GUIDELINES.md before triaging, landing, or closing PRs

Project Scope

Before adding new feature surface area, read engdocs/PROJECT_CHARTER.md. Beads owns issue tracking primitives and should not encode orchestration-layer policy, become a storage engine, or casually expand the database schema when metadata would work.

PR Safety for Agents

Before triaging, reviewing, landing, closing, or otherwise maintaining PRs, read PR_MAINTAINER_GUIDELINES.md. The maintainer policy is to maximize community throughput: find useful contributor value, absorb or transform it locally when practical, preserve attribution, and use request-changes only as a last resort.

Before implementing work, opening a PR, or merging/closing a PR, run the PR preflight:

scripts/pr-preflight.sh --search "<topic keywords>" --repo gastownhall/beads
scripts/pr-preflight.sh <pr-number> --repo gastownhall/beads

External contributor PRs have priority. Review and build on their branch when possible, preserve their tests and attribution, and never close or supersede their PR silently. If a rewrite is unavoidable, explain why on the original PR and credit their design/tests.

Read the full file on GitHub · 291 lines

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.

yesterday First seen · 291 lines · 2,901 tokens per session scan C 5aa99bf25f08

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beads AGENTS.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/beads (26,754 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 2,901 tokens to every session, about $0.0145 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it C with 1 finding (recursive force delete). No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Planning Project management Testing agents claude-code coding

beads AGENTS.md

Getting it into your agent

What it costs to keep this loaded

Grade C, and why

Recursive force deletehighDestructive command

How it starts

Agent Instructions

Key Sections

Project Scope

PR Safety for Agents

What this file has done since we first saw it

Other instructions, from other repositories

yaks AGENTS.md

lineark CLAUDE.md

blz AGENTS.md

moo-tasks AGENTS.md

skill-harness AGENTS.md

agentor CLAUDE.md