A guide for Beads, a distributed Git-backed issue tracker for tasks, dependencies, and AI-agent workflows.

Use it to create, update, inspect, and coordinate Beads tasks across branches and agent sessions.

It explains how to manage connected tasks and parallel work without losing track of what depends on what.

beads — Skill for Claude Code by vinnie357

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.

Any agent

npx skills add vinnie357/claude-skills --skill beads

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/vinnie357/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install beads, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill, 1 agent.

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.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads/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.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/vinnie357/claude-skills/beads.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 39 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 3,986 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

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 5.1	$0.00039	$0.03986
Opus 5	$0.00019	$0.01993
Sonnet 5	$0.00008	$0.00797
Haiku 4.5	$0.00004	$0.00399

Measured 7d ago against content hash 40897fb2fff1, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-10, 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 7d 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.

plugins/tools/beads/skills/beads/SKILL.md · 491 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 491 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Beads - Distributed Git-Backed Issue Tracker

This skill activates when working with Beads (bd) for task management, dependency tracking, and AI agent workflows.

What is Beads?

Beads is a distributed graph issue tracker designed for AI agents and modern development workflows. As of v1.1.x it is powered by Dolt — a version-controlled SQL database — not plain JSONL+SQLite (confirmed against gastownhall/beads README, tag v1.1.2; the legacy SQLite backend has been removed):

Hash-based IDs: Collision-resistant task identifiers of the form <prefix>-<suffix>. Observed default in bd 1.1.0: a 3-character base36 suffix (letters+digits, not hex — e.g. ten fresh issues produced i8v, 0bh, j63, 21c, 1k4, tt6, 6do, da7, uki, u0f; v/k/o/u/i/t aren't hex digits). bd config set id.hash_length <n> / id.prefix <name> both return "not a recognized config key. Did you mean 'git.hash_length'/'git.prefix'?" and still store the value as an arbitrary key with no observed effect on ID generation — bd config list shows the real, already-set prefix key is issue_prefix (defaulted from the directory name at init), not id.prefix. Hierarchical children append .N (e.g. bd-a3f8e9.1).
Dolt-backed storage: Issue data lives in a Dolt database under .beads/embeddeddolt/ (embedded mode, the default) or .beads/dolt/ (bd init --server, external dolt sql-server). .beads/issues.jsonl is an export for viewers/interchange/migration — it is not the source of truth and not the sync channel.
Dependency-aware: Query ready tasks with bd ready
JSON output: Machine-readable format via the global --json flag
Cross-machine sync via Dolt remotes: bd dolt push / bd dolt pull against refs/dolt/data on the git remote, separate from source branches

Installation

See references/installation.md for npm, Homebrew, Go install, and mise (multi-architecture) methods:

npm install -g @beads/bd

Read the full file on GitHub · 491 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 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.

7d ago First seen · 491 lines · 39 tokens per session scan A 40897fb2fff1

Subscribe to this mod's changes

beads is a skill published in the GitHub repository vinnie357/claude-skills (25 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 39 tokens to every session and 3,986 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.

Git and workflow Project management

mcore-split-pr

Split a PR into multiple PRs to reduce the number of required CODEOWNERS reviewer groups.

NVIDIA/skills · 25 tokens

shiplog

Recap of everything shipped since the last run - cross-repo PRs, security fixes, star deltas, and X traction, synthesized into a digest article and a ready-to-post shiplog in your voice.

aeonfun/aeon · 46 tokens

llxprt-issue-workflow

Use this skill when asked to address, fix, or work on a GitHub issue in the llxprt-code repository. Covers the complete issue lifecycle - branch setup, gh CLI usage, test-first planning, subagent delegation and review loops, the full verification cycle (including the stepfun-37 smoke test), open code review (ocr), PR…

vybestack/llxprt-code · 87 tokens

beads