work-beads

Work Beads

Work the requested Beads queue with the ship loop. Preserve the atomic claim, lease, verification, review, and queue contracts across agents.

The loop contract:

set identity once, then repeat up to N times (one bead in flight per agent):
  refresh view -> select ONE bead -> claim atomically, then validate (lost the
  claim? next candidate; dup/conflict? cooldown-release + next) -> worktree
  -> build (draft PR on first push; renew lease on each push)
  -> verify (make check-affected) -> review (mmr, max 3 rounds per cycle)
  -> enqueue (make mq-enqueue) and move on -> daemon lands + closes the bead
batch end (budget spent, queue drained, or an external stop): report in the slots

The agent's finish line is a green gate + passing review + the PR ENQUEUED — the merge-queue daemon batches, lands, and closes the bead; do not wait for the merge or bd close an enqueued bead yourself. (No merge queue installed? Land via the serialized merge slot instead — same finish line, you just do the merge.) Standing authorization: run the whole loop without asking permission. Do not end your turn after opening a draft PR with a list of "next steps" — that is the #1 observed agent failure. Stop when the user asks to stop. Otherwise, the only mid-loop stops are a true external dependency, missing credentials or authority, a destructive action, a material product decision outside the acceptance criteria, or a demonstrated technical plateau after safe approaches are exhausted. An unresolved required-safeguard defect is not a plateau; an in-scope blocker starts or continues remediation.

Each review cycle has at most three rounds. A genuine round-three in-scope or required-safeguard blocker starts a new cycle only after a concrete repair, focused regression proof, and the required gate; review the new exact head from round one. Duplicate, stale, hypothetical, speculative, cosmetic, and already- dispositioned findings cannot restart review. No owner approval is required for in-scope remediation. Merge only when the final exact head meets the channel floor, all required gates pass, every finding is dispositioned, and no verified blocker remains.

Invocation: /work-beads (1 bead) · /work-beads N (up to N beads, selected one at a time at claim time — N is a budget, not a reservation; never pre-pick a list) · /work-beads N <label> (same, scoped to a label) · /work-beads <id> [<id>...] (explicit IDs, worked in dependency order). For the detailed phase procedures, load the router in .agents/skills/work-beads/SKILL.md when reading this as an AGENTS.md or Cursor rule.