gastownhall/beads is a command-line graph issue tracker that gives coding agents persistent, structured memory through a dependency-aware task database. It is for developers and AI agents handling long-running work across tasks, branches, and sessions. The catalogue entries provide integrations and workflows for operating Beads with coding agents.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to gastownhall/beads. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/gastownhall/beads/main/.claude/skills/beads-docs/SKILL.mdgit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/gastownhall/beadsWrote 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.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/gastownhall/beads/beads-docs)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gastownhall/beads/beads-docs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gastownhall/beads/beads-docs/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/gastownhall/beads/beads-docs"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/gastownhall/beads/beads-docs.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 5.1 | $0.00170 | $0.03266 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00068 | $0.01306 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00034 | $0.00653 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00017 | $0.00327 |
Grade A, and why
beads-docs 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 1mo 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 223 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Writing beads docs
This is the house style for docs/ — the beads user documentation, published
as a Mintlify site. The goal is docs that motivate before they jargon, say the
same thing the same way everywhere, show concepts as pictures and snippets
instead of walls of prose, and never drift from the code. Apply it to any page
you create, edit, or review.
The audience of docs/ is a user of beads — a human or agent installing
bd, tracking work, and syncing it. Contributor-facing material lives in
engdocs/ and AGENTS.md and follows different rules (it may describe the
implementation literally). When this skill says "the docs," it means docs/.
1. The canonical model
Beads is a dependency-aware issue graph with a workflow layer on top. Teach it
consistently and link to the canonical concept page —
docs/core-concepts/index.md — rather than re-explaining it.
| Concept | Role | Key idea |
|---|---|---|
| bead (issue) | the unit of work | one tracked item with a hash ID (bd-a1b2), type, status, priority; "bead" and "issue" name the same thing |
| dependency | ordering | blocks edges hide a bead from agents until its blockers close; parent-child, related, discovered-from organize without blocking |
| ready work | what bd ready computes |
open beads with no open blockers, excluding in_progress, blocked, deferred, and hooked — the claimable frontier |
| formula | workflow source | a TOML/JSON file defining a DAG of steps; bd cook compiles it into a proto |
| proto | workflow template | a template epic (label template) with {{variables}}; not live work |
| molecule | instantiated workflow | real beads poured from a proto (bd mol pour); persistent |
| wisp | ephemeral molecule | same instantiation, transient lifecycle (bd mol wisp); purged by bd purge |
| gate | async wait | blocks a workflow step until closed — by a human, a timer, a GitHub run/PR, or a cross-rig bead |
| sync | cross-machine movement | Dolt push/pull over refs/dolt/data on the git remote; .beads/issues.jsonl is a passive export, never the database |
| federation | cross-repo sync | peer-to-peer sharing of beads across repos/organizations |
What ships with it
3 files 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.
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.
- 1mo ago First seen · 223 lines · 170 tokens per session scan A fe88cbe992cb
beads-docs is a skill published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/beads (27,917 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 170 tokens to every session and 3,266 once invoked, about $0.0007 per session on Opus 5.5. 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.
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preparing-a-yak
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