beads

beads is a skill for Claude Code from flurdy/agent-skills. It costs 77 tokens per session (1,643 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A workflow for managing durable tasks with Beads, a shared task-tracking system used by coding agents. It covers ownership, blockers, dependencies, follow-ups, and handoff memory.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating, reading, updating, handing off, or resolving tracked tasks, especially when work has dependencies or must survive across sessions.
Why use it?
It prevents important work decisions from being lost in a temporary chat or assigned to the wrong task store. It also helps agents follow the repository's existing tracking rules.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: model in frontmatter; names the AskUserQuestion tool; mentions AGENTS.md.

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 skills/flurdy/agent-skills/beads
Any agent
npx skills add flurdy/agent-skills --skill beads
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/flurdy/agent-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

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 beads

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/flurdy/agent-skills/beads.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/flurdy/agent-skills/beads)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/flurdy/agent-skills/beads"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/flurdy/agent-skills/beads.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,643 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 5.1 $0.00077 $0.01643
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.00822
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00329
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00164

Measured 6d ago against content hash 1d3765a3aa34, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

beads 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 6d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (tests/test-skill-contract.sh), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

skills/beads/SKILL.md · 148 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 148 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Beads Workflow

Apply this baseline whenever Beads is active. It decides where durable work belongs and which focused skill owns the operation; it is not another intake, grooming, migration, or sync procedure.

Authority and opt-in

Repository-local instructions remain authoritative for whether Beads is active, which tracker and store own work, lifecycle conventions, and stronger safety rules. Follow the nearest AGENTS.md or equivalent project guidance before this shared baseline when they differ.

Do not initialize Beads merely because this skill loaded. If the repository has no active Beads store, follow its declared Jira, Trello, or other tracking policy. If no tracker is declared, ask before introducing one.

Never edit generated Beads integration blocks manually. In particular, content between <!-- BEGIN BEADS INTEGRATION --> and <!-- END BEADS INTEGRATION --> is owned by bd and may be regenerated. Put human-maintained policy outside those markers.

Resolve the owning store

Resolve ownership before every read that drives a decision and before every mutation. Never infer the owning store from an issue ID, label, prefix, or the current directory.

For an existing bead or selector, run the shared resolver first:

~/.agents/skills/next/scripts/next-select resolve <selector>
  • resolved: use the returned absolute directory. Every later bd call uses bd -C <directory>.
  • ambiguous: show the repository-qualified selectors and ask which owner is intended; write nothing.
  • unavailable: report the failed store probes; write nothing because ownership is unproven.
  • not-found: do not guess another store or create a replacement automatically.

For new durable work, choose ownership by outcome:

  • Cross-project work belongs in the validated workspace root store.
  • Work wholly owned by one repository belongs in that repository's active store.
  • Repository-local tracker policy may override either default.

A workspace store and its member stores remain independent. Do not merge or synchronize them as a side effect of resolving ownership.

Read the full file on GitHub · 148 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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. 6d ago First seen · 148 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A 1d3765a3aa34

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beads is a skill published in the GitHub repository flurdy/agent-skills (8 stars, last pushed 7d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 1,643 once invoked, about $0.0004 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 2026-08-31.

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