Make dependencies explicit
Represent work as a graph rather than hoping independent tasks will remain independent.
Trade-off: A graph can become stale as reality changes.
Tool / Task state
Beads
Track tasks and dependencies as multiple agents work on a codebase.
The summary describes what the project says it does; inclusion is not an endorsement.
Approaches it illustrates
Mentioned in
Quote
bd ready --claim is not atomic — two workers can claim the same bead concurrently
github.com · Issue #3570
“Two workers polling within the same window can both observe the same ready bead, both claim it, and both begin work. Result: duplicated work, near-identical PRs, wasted compute.”
Take
Reported from an overnight Gas Town convoy, and closed the same day. A closed issue doesn't show that every variant of the race is gone.
- Coordinate
Quote
'bd ready --claim' is not transactional: two concurrent invocations both receive the same bead
github.com · Issue #5998
“Multi-worker fleets polling with --claim currently double-fill.”
Take
Reported against bd 1.2.2 four months after #3570 closed, and still open in October 2026. The same kind of failure, but nobody has shown it is the same code path.
- Coordinate
Quote
Dolt Concurrency Model: Transaction-Based Shared Main
github.com · Problem Statement, item 1
“Workers can't see each other's beads. A bead created by agent A is invisible to agent B until A's branch merges to main.”
Take
Giving each worker its own branch let them write without contention, but they couldn't coordinate. The design doc moved everything to one shared main with explicit transactions, live since 24 February 2026.
- Coordinate
- Isolate
Quote
bug: bd list / bd ready serves stale cached state lagging live store by minutes under write load
github.com · Issue #2987
“bd list over the molecule's 50 step beads reported open=50, in_progress=0, closed=0 — zero progress reflected in the cached read.”
Take
A shared database can still give two answers: cached list reads lagged the store by minutes. Open, with the cause suspected but not confirmed.
- Coordinate
Quote
I put Temporal around my software factory. Here’s what it fixed, and what it didn’t.
medium.com · Pull quote under the subtitle
“A durable work record is not the same thing as a durable procedure.”
Take
A task that survives a crash in the tracker can still lose the process working on it. She has contributed hundreds of PRs to Gas City and runs it on itself.
- Coordinate
- Remember
Quote
I put Temporal around my software factory. Here’s what it fixed, and what it didn’t.
medium.com · The three failures I wanted Temporal to stop
“Completion is fenced too: Beads accepts a receipt only when the work ID, generation, claim token, and Workflow identity still match.”
Take
Fencing tokens borrowed from distributed systems, applied to agent work. She is careful to say two of the three fixes still run in shadow and the third in a scoped canary, so this is a design, not a proven guarantee.
- Verify
Quote
I put Temporal around my software factory. Here’s what it fixed, and what it didn’t.
medium.com · When a town won’t stay lit
“Because every dispatch reparsed the entire file under a lock, order firing froze. One wedged session claimed the same bead ten times over 5.6 hours.”
Take
About 100 patrol and repair jobs were firing roughly 850 times an hour. The store had grown to 168 MB with 79,210 beads, 96% of them closed.
- Coordinate
Quote
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:15:01
“There's a JSON file, one line per issue, and it has merge conflicts all the time, and it gets xlerped into the database, and there's a daemon, and it gets stale.”
Take
This describes the early Beads storage, which the move to Dolt replaced. It isn't how Beads works today.
- Remember
- Coordinate
Quote
Gas Town, Beads, and the Rise of Agentic Development
softwareengineeringdaily.com · Transcript, 0:28:41
“Then one day a swarm took off and fixed all my bugs. I had like 30 Beads all like lined up to knock out. And I couldn't find them, and I panicked.”
Take
The work was done, but the operator couldn't tell. A first-hand anecdote, not a benchmark; the episode doesn't say how many agents ran.
- Coordinate
Quote
Gas Town: from Clown Show to v1.0
steve-yegge.medium.com · Beads: Ready for v1
“The inherent fragility of the v0.x Beads architecture, with its bidirectional sync, 3-way merge, two sources of truth, race conditions, and tombstone hell — that's all gone now.”
- Remember