I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker
Details
- External ID
- 46487580
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker
- Website domain
- github.com
- Launched
- Jan. 4, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 84
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.8801054018445322
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:25 p.m.
Description
I've been running long duration coding agents with Claude Code for about 6 months now. Steve Yegge released Beads back in October and I found that giving Claude tools for proper task tracking was a massive unlock. But Beads grew massively in a short time and every release made it slower and more frustrating to use. I started battling it several times a week as its background daemon took to syncing the wrong things at the wrong times.Over the holidays I finally ripped it out and wrote ticket as a replacement. It keeps the core concept I actually cared about (graph-based task dependencies) but drops everything else.ticket a single file bash script built on coreutils managing flat files. You don't need to index everything with SQLite when you have awk. It's just a small plumbing utility that gets out of your way so you can get to work.Would love feedback on gaps. I built this for my own agent workflows so there are probably use cases I haven't thought about.
Enrichment
- Theme
- Claude integrations and coding agents
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Workflow automation
- Audience
- Prosumer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Hobby / open-source project
- Normalized one-liner
- markdown-based task tracker
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
Yes A CLI and file-based task tracker that reads and writes Markdown files or frontmatter for LLM agent integration is straightforward to build.
Discussion
20 comments analyzed.
Competitors mentioned: Forgejo (self-hosted git with issue tracking), Beads (task management tool), Backlog.md (markdown-based ticketing with TUI/WebUI), Beans (MD-based issue tracker), vibe-kanban (visual task monitoring)
Concerns raised: Storing files in project repo by default is undesirable, Agents create tasks in wrong directories, causing mess, Task fields often ignored by agents after creation, Bash/AWK/jq implementation complexity and maintainability, Coordination overhead for multiple parallel agents unclear
Feature requests: Export existing GitHub/GitLab issues to Ticket, Lighter CLI version optimized for Claude Skills, Upward directory search to prevent misplaced tasks, Better agent context-switching for parallel work, Skill wrapper instead of separate package distribution
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 160 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #21 of 161 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 52 days after the earliest competitor.
- I am running 3 coding agents non-stop over the last 3 days. Here is how · hn · 2026-06-13 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.51
- td · hn · 2026-04-07 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Abralo · hn · 2026-07-08 · 37 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- A coding-agent workbench built around Matt Pocock's coding workflow · hn · 2026-08-21 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Lessons learned from running Claude Code swarms at scale · hn · 2026-06-05 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Marky · hn · 2026-04-16 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- Clinch · hn · 2026-08-18 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- 49IDE · hn · 2026-08-08 · 11 upvotes · similarity 0.41
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
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