Beads Best Practices

Beads Best Practices

Apply these practices to every Beads interaction, regardless of repository, storage mode, team policy, or higher-level workflow.

When the repository opts into the solo-maintainer policy, also load and follow beads-solo. That skill controls authorization, setup, storage, and governance; this skill controls reusable issue-writing and update practices. Neither supersedes the other.

Claim Before Starting Work

Inspect the bead, then claim it before beginning substantive work:

bd show "$id"
bd update "$id" --claim

Do not edit code, change project state, or begin the task while its bead remains unclaimed. Claiming makes ownership visible and prevents duplicated work.

If another worker already owns the bead, do not overwrite the assignee or work on it in parallel without coordination. Stop and resolve ownership through the active project workflow. Re-running --claim is acceptable when the bead is already assigned to the current worker.

Keep Work-in-Progress Status Honest

Treat in_progress as evidence of work happening now, not as a reservation for a batch of issues you intend to address later. By default, claim exactly one bead at a time and leave related or queued work open while you inspect or sequence it.

Before switching to another bead:

1. Close the current bead if its acceptance criteria are complete; or
2. Post a checkpoint comment and return it to open (or defer it) if work is pausing.
3. Then inspect and claim the next bead immediately before starting it.

Multiple beads may be in_progress only when work is genuinely concurrent, such as separate workers actively owning independent tasks, or when the active workflow explicitly requires overlapping tracked work. Do not bulk-claim a label, epic, milestone, search result, or requested task set merely because all items are in scope.

Work That Needs a Person

One Bead, One Doer

A bead is done by a person or by an agent, never by both. When part of the work needs a person and the rest needs an agent, that is two beads, joined by a dependency.

This holds whichever order they come in:

• Decide, then build — "Choose the storage backend" (person) blocks "Implement the storage layer" (agent).
• Build, then check — "Implement the export" (agent) blocks "Confirm the exported PDF looks right" (person).

Split at the point where the doer changes, and give the person's bead only their part. Keep it narrow: one decision, one observation, one approval.

bd human respond closes the bead it answers. If the bead also contains agent work, answering it closes work nobody did. Split properly and the answer closes exactly what the person was asked for, while the dependency releases the rest.

Creating the Person's Bead

Create the bead, describe what is needed, label it human, and make the dependent work wait on it:

ask=$(bd create --title="Decide: <the question>" \
                --description="<context, options, what turns on each>" \
                --type=task --json | jq -r .id)
bd label add "$ask" human
bd dep add "$work" "$ask"
bd human list --json

bd human list is how the user finds these, and it lists exactly the beads carrying the label. A bead needing a person but carrying no label is invisible: it looks like every other open issue, and they have no reason to know they are the blocker.

Leaving the explanation in a comment alone is not enough. A comment reading "awaiting live verification before close" is only found by someone already reading that bead — the one person who is not looking.

Split out a person's bead when:

• an acceptance criterion requires human observation, such as confirming a visual change on screen or that a sound plays;
• the work needs credentials, hardware, an account, or a physical device the agent cannot reach;
• a product, naming, or scope decision must be made before work continues; or
• the agent believes work is complete but cannot verify the criteria that would justify closing it.

The last two are where mixed beads usually creep in. A bead written as "implement X and confirm it works on the device" is two beads that were never separated; split it rather than labelling the whole thing.

Write the description for someone with no other context — they see the bead and its comments and nothing else. State what is needed as a checkable list, and where it is a choice, give the real options and what turns on each. A request with no instructions transfers the interruption without transferring the context, leaving the person to reconstruct what the agent already knew.

Keep the Person's Bead Out of the Agent Queue

A person's bead is usually blocked by nothing, so it appears in bd ready like any other issue. Nothing upstream excludes it — bd ready has no knowledge of the label.

So every automatic queue read must exclude it explicitly:

bd ready --exclude-label=human

Treat that as an invariant. Miss it in one place and an agent picks up "Choose the storage backend" as ordinary ready work and chooses.

The dependency protects the dependent work; only --exclude-label=human protects the question itself. Both are needed.

Do Not Leave It in_progress

A bead waiting on a person is not being worked on. Leaving it in_progress makes blocked work indistinguishable from active work, and from work an agent abandoned mid-task.

Keep it open, so the status describes reality and the label carries the reason. Reserve in_progress for work happening now, per Keep Work-in-Progress Status Honest.

After creating the bead, labelling it, and adding the dependency, run bd human list --json and verify it appears. This catches an incomplete handoff before an unattended workflow moves on.

The User Drains the Queue, Not You

Once labelled, the bead is the user's. Do not answer it yourself, and do not keep checking whether the blocker went away — move on to other ready work.

They drain the queue with the beads-blocker-review skill, exposed as the /blockers command, which walks the beads one at a time and answers each with bd human respond. That closes the bead and releases whatever depended on it, so the work returns to bd ready on its own.

An answer can arrive at any time, including mid-run. So re-read the queue fresh on every pass: never skip a bead because you remember labelling it, and never assume one you labelled is still waiting. The bead's current state is the only authority.

When the queue is non-empty, point the user at /blockers rather than merely reporting a count.

Clearing the Label

Normally you never do this — the user's answer closes the bead through bd human respond, and the label stays attached as a record of what happened. bd human stats reads it to report responded and dismissed counts.

Only remove the label when new evidence proves a person was never needed:

bd comments add "$id" "Human attention no longer needed: <evidence>"
bd label remove "$id" human
bd human list --json

Never use bd human respond or bd human dismiss on the user's behalf. Those record a human's decision; inventing one answers the question they were asked.

Do Not Close Around the Human

Never close a bead by satisfying its criteria a different way than it asks. When a criterion says the change was observed running, reading the code and concluding it must work is not that criterion — it is a substitution, made by the party least able to judge whether it holds.

Split the verification into the person's own bead and let them do it. An agent closing its own unverifiable work is how a bug gets marked fixed several times while the user keeps hitting it.

Pair IDs with Human-Readable Titles

Never refer to a bead in human-facing prose solely by its opaque ID. Pair the ID with its title or a concise human-readable description so readers do not have to look it up to understand the reference.

Prefer either of these forms:

- `ai-wt0` — **Handle expired sessions**
- Handle expired sessions (`ai-wt0`)

Apply this to conversation responses, progress reports, comments, handoffs, blocker explanations, commit summaries, and lists of related work. When a bead has already been introduced in the immediate context, use its readable title rather than falling back to the bare ID. Bare IDs remain appropriate in machine-facing commands such as bd show ai-wt0.

Track Every Work Item

All substantive project work must be represented by a bead. Do not perform untracked work merely because it is small, related to the active task, or a tangent discovered along the way.

When a distinct work item emerges during another task:

1. Create a new bead before pursuing it.

2. Explain the discovery and the work clearly in its Markdown body.

3. Link it to the active bead, normally with discovered-from:

   bd create --title="Newly discovered work" \
       --deps="discovered-from:$active_id" --body-file - <<'EOF'
   ## Context
   
   Discovered while working on the originating bead.
   
   ## Task
   
   Describe the distinct follow-up work.
   EOF
   

4. Add blocking dependencies when the new work must finish before the active bead can continue.

5. Return to the active bead, or explicitly claim the new bead before switching to it.

Create the bead even when the work will be deferred or handed to someone else. Do not silently expand the active bead's scope. Routine steps already required by its stated task and acceptance criteria remain in that bead and do not need separate per-command issues.

Choose Grouping Deliberately

Labels and epics are different mechanisms, and they compose. Applying a label to every bead in a set is nearly always right; adding an epic parent is a separate decision.

Use a label for an attribute or a perpetual category with no end state, such as area:auth, tech-debt, or needs-review. A bead can carry several, they cross-cut unrelated work, and they can be applied retroactively without restructuring anything.

Use an epic for a bounded deliverable with a done condition. An epic is a real issue, so it carries status, priority, and a description holding the feature-level narrative and acceptance criteria; it reports roll-up progress through bd epic status; and it can itself block or be blocked. In exchange it is an extra issue to maintain and close, and each bead has only one parent.

An epic whose done condition never arrives is worse than no epic. When a set of work has no feature-level completion state, group it with a label alone.

Hierarchy Is Not Dependency

--parent records presentational hierarchy only. It imposes no ordering whatsoever.

The value of Beads is an arbitrary dependency graph, so never let a parent tree stand in for it. Record every real ordering constraint explicitly with bd dep add, including dependencies between children of the same epic, which may depend on one another in any shape the work requires.

Note also that epics appear in bd ready alongside actionable work. Filter them out with bd ready --exclude-type=epic when that is noisy.

Reference the Bead in Every Commit

When a commit implements, advances, or closes tracked work, name the bead in its message. A commit that leaves no trace of its bead forces readers to reconstruct the link from timestamps, and the rationale recorded in the bead becomes unreachable from the code history.

Use the trailer form unless the repository already uses another convention:

Refs: bead ai-wt0

Determine the convention from the repository rather than assuming, and prefer an explicit documented rule over inference:

1. Check the project's agent instructions for a stated commit convention.

2. Otherwise search the history for existing references, rather than reading only the last handful of commits:

   git log --format='%h|%s|%b' | grep -iE '\b(refs|closes|fixes)\b.*[a-z]+-[a-z0-9]+' | head
   

Sampling only recent commits is unreliable: a convention applied inconsistently, or omitted from the most recent work, will look absent. Treat a single documented or historical example as establishing the convention, and raise the inconsistency rather than silently following the omission.

When no convention exists anywhere, add the Refs: trailer and say so, so the maintainer can confirm or correct it.

Write Human-facing Content as Markdown

Treat every human-facing text field as Markdown:

• descriptions and bodies
• design and acceptance criteria
• notes, when their use is appropriate
• comments
• close or supersede reasons
• handoff and blocker updates

Use headings, paragraphs, lists, checkboxes, inline code, fenced code blocks, and links where they make the content easier to scan.

Avoid walls of text. Separate sections and paragraphs with blank lines, and turn sequences or sets of facts into lists. Do not rely on renderer word wrap or single newlines inside one paragraph to provide structure.

Keep titles concise plain text; put detail in the Markdown body.

Link Every Relevant Reference

Represent GitHub issues, pull requests, documentation, dashboards, and other relevant web references as descriptive Markdown hyperlinks. Do not leave a bare URL or an unlinked textual reference when its target is available.

Use direct links and labels that identify the destination. Format technical identifiers inside link labels as inline code:

- Issue: [`owner/repository#123`][issue]
- Pull request: [`owner/repository#456`][pull-request]
- Reference: [Beads sync concepts][sync-concepts]

[issue]: https://github.com/owner/repository/issues/123
[pull-request]: https://github.com/owner/repository/pull/456
[sync-concepts]: https://example.com/beads/sync-concepts

Resolve the canonical target before posting. Do not fabricate a URL when the link target is unknown; find it first, or state clearly that it could not be resolved.

Format Technical Text as Code

Enclose code, technical symbols, and identifiers in backticks. This includes:

• function, class, method, variable, and type names;
• file and directory paths;
• commands, subcommands, arguments, and flags;
• environment variables and configuration keys;
• package names, versions, branches, tags, and commit identifiers;
• Beads IDs and other issue identifiers; and
• API routes, HTTP methods, field names, and literal values.

Use inline code for short items such as bd update, --claim, src/auth/session.ts, refreshToken, and ai-wt0. Use a fenced code block with an appropriate language for multiline commands, code, structured data, or logs. Do not use backticks merely for emphasis around ordinary prose.

Preserve Real Line Breaks

Pass actual newline characters to bd. Do not store literal \n sequences, and do not compress structured content into a long one-line flag value.

Prefer stdin or file flags when the command supports them:

bd create --title="Handle expired sessions" --type=task --body-file - <<'EOF'
## Context

Expired sessions currently produce an unclear error.

## Acceptance Criteria

- Return an actionable message.
- Cover the expired-session path with a test.
EOF

bd update "$id" --body-file - <<'EOF'
## Context

The failure occurs before token refresh.

## Next Step

Add coverage around the refresh boundary.
EOF

For a multiline comment, preserve the Markdown in a shell variable or file:

comment=$(cat <<'EOF'
## Progress

- Added the regression test.
- Confirmed that it fails before the fix.

## Next Step

Update the refresh path.
EOF
)
bd comments add "$id" "$comment"

Use the same pattern for fields that only accept string flags. Quote every multiline variable expansion.

Use Comments for Chronological Updates

Append a comment rather than updating notes whenever time, author, order, or history is relevant. Comments are the durable activity log and preserve the metadata needed to understand how work evolved.

Use comments for:

• progress and handoff updates
• discoveries and investigation results
• decisions and their rationale
• blockers and unblock events
• test or review results
• changes in approach or scope

Keep every active bead regularly updated. Post a comment at meaningful checkpoints rather than waiting until the task is complete. At minimum, comment:

• after substantial progress or a significant discovery or decision;
• whenever the blocker, scope, approach, or next step changes; and
• before pausing, handing off, or ending a work session.

For long-running work, add periodic checkpoint comments even when no major milestone has completed, so the latest comment still explains the current state and next step. Do not comment after every command or create noise; the cadence should make the work resumable by another person or agent.

Do not append a running journal to notes. The notes field is not timestamped. Reserve it, if used at all, for timeless supplementary information that represents the issue's current state and is safe to replace as a whole. When in doubt, post a comment.

Keep Updates Useful

• State what changed, why it matters, and what happens next.
• Reference relevant issue IDs, commits, files, commands, or URLs.
• Use concrete outcomes instead of vague status such as "made progress."
• Keep each update focused; use multiple paragraphs or sections when it covers distinct facts.
• Never include credentials, private data, or unrelated environment details.