commontoolsinc Task Management
At the user level, we use Linear to manage tasks. When the Linear MCP is available, you can consult this directly.
Our workflow is to run many worktrees and checkouts of the repo and work on
multiple research tasks and tasks in parallel. For managing todos and progress
WITHIN a session you are encouraged to use bd (beads) to manage the work -
falling back to a NOTES.md text based flow otherwise.
bd is an external tool, not part of this repo, and is not installed on every
machine. Check for it first (which bd); when it is absent, use the NOTES.md
flow without asking about it.
If available, use bd to manage subtasks and local todo lists (bd quickstart
and bd --help)
- Break down plans into issues with dependencies and keep up-to-date during development
- Instruct subagents to consult
bdregularly - Use this to offload detail from your working memory and record extra details, bugs along the way with the user
The goal is to avoid 'clinging' to a context window, making it trivial to clear
the session and re-hydrate context from bd. When you start a task, update
FOCUS.md with a high-level understanding of the task. If a user, or another
agent, reads your bd issues, commits and FOCUS.md they should be able to
immediately take over and help with the work.