beads-docs

A writing guide for the Beads project documentation, including pages, navigation, diagrams, and recovery guides. It defines the shared language and style used in the Mintlify documentation site.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when creating, editing, restructuring, or reviewing files under docs/, or when writing explanations about Beads.
Why use it?
It helps documentation stay clear, consistent, and aligned with how Beads actually works. It also separates user-facing guidance from contributor instructions.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

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

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 170 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 3,266 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 $0.00170 $0.03266
Opus 5 $0.00085 $0.01633
Sonnet 5 $0.00034 $0.00653
Haiku 4.5 $0.00017 $0.00327

Measured yesterday against content hash fe88cbe992cb, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

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 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.

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.

.claude/skills/beads-docs/SKILL.md · 223 lines

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

Read the full file on GitHub · 223 lines

Files

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.

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. yesterday First seen · 223 lines · 170 tokens per session scan A fe88cbe992cb

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beads-docs is a skill published in the GitHub repository gastownhall/beads (26,754 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 170 tokens to every session and 3,266 once invoked, about $0.0009 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.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

skill-creator

Create, improve, evaluate, benchmark skills. Use when authoring a new skill, updating an existing one, running evals, or optimizing a skill's description for triggering. Don't use for invoking skills, writing prose, or scaffolding Python projects.

luongnv89/asm · 54 tokens

find-me-skills

Find Agent Skills for a goal the user cannot name yet, then export an installable bundle. Use when they ask which skills fit a project. Don't use for installing named skills, authoring skills, or catalog maintenance.

luongnv89/asm · 49 tokens

skill-upstream-pr

Improve an open-source GitHub skill and open a friendly suggestion PR upstream: fork, run skill-auto-improver, attach asm eval before/after metrics. Don't use for local-only skills, authoring from scratch, bulk repos, or registry publish.

luongnv89/asm · 56 tokens

well-formed

Review pull request diffs for code smells, style issues, and safety problems before merging.

luongnv89/asm · 22 tokens

skill-auto-improver

Improve an external, legacy, or drifted SKILL.md to the skill-creator standard — hard validation gates plus an advisory predictability audit. Don't use for authoring from scratch (skill-creator output is already standard), bulk eval, or prose edits.

luongnv89/asm · 58 tokens

skill-index-updater

Add GitHub skill repos to the ASM index: clone, audit, eval, regenerate index, rebuild catalog, open PR. Use when given GitHub URLs to onboard. Don't use for authoring (skill-creator), improving (skill-auto-improver), or install (asm install).

luongnv89/asm · 63 tokens