ForkFree

AI agents and automation

beads

by gastownhall

Beads is a command-line issue tracker that gives AI coding agents a lasting, structured memory of tasks and their dependencies. It replaces loose markdown to-do lists so agents can handle long projects without losing track of what is done and what is blocked.

Worth a lookEstablished, with a few things to check (listed below).

View on GitHubProject website

Stars
28.2k
Licence
MIT
Runs on
Your computer
Setup
Moderate
Language
Go
Age
380 days

What you can do with it

  • Create tasks and link them with dependencies so an agent knows which work is ready to start
  • Store project facts with a single command so agents recall them in later sessions
  • Sync tasks between machines and several agents without merge clashes, using Dolt

Make money with it

A freelance developer could use it to run AI-assisted client builds more reliably and take on larger projects in the same time.

An idea, not financial advice. Check the licence before charging for anything built on it.

Ways a business could use it

  • Keep AI coding agents organised on a software project so fewer paid tokens are wasted repeating context
  • Track and split up client development work across several agents or branches without a paid project management tool

Can you use it commercially?

Free to use, change and sell, including in paid products. Keep the copyright notice.

Not legal advice. Read the project's licence file before building a product on it.

Getting it running

Install with Homebrew (brew install beads), npm (npm install -g @beads/bd) or the install script, then run bd init in your project.

Follow the official instructions in the project README.

Things to check

  • Only useful alongside a coding agent, which may need paid API access or a subscription
  • Upgrades across schema changes need careful steps when databases are shared between machines

Who's talking about it

Checked 27 Oct 2026. Summary drafted by AI from the project's README.

More in AI agents and automation

Agent-Reach Panniantong
Worth a look

Agent Reach is a command-line tool that lets AI coding agents search and read sites they normally cannot reach, such as Reddit, X (Twitter), YouTube, Bilibili, XiaoHongShu and GitHub. It returns clean, read-only results through one command, using free upstream tools rather than paid APIs.

104.3k stars +990 a day MIT
TradingAgents TauricResearch
Worth a look

TradingAgents is a Python framework that uses several AI agents, each with a different role such as fundamentals, news, sentiment and technical analysis, to discuss a stock and produce a trading recommendation. It is built for research and for experimenting with multi-agent setups, not for giving financial advice.

116.7k stars +863 a day Apache-2.0
orca stablyai
Worth a look

Orca is a desktop app, with a phone companion, for running several AI coding agents side by side, each in its own git worktree. It lets you track, review and steer their work from one place.

107.4k stars +514 a day MIT