I replaced Beads with a faster, simpler Markdown-based task tracker
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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.
HN · launched Jan 4, 2026 · 84 upvotes (top 12%) · 0 views
Niche: developer productivity and workflow management · 198 launches, 47 in the last 7 days ▲ +488% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Workflow automation
- Developer
- AI feature
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 198 launches in developer productivity and workflow management →
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 : 304 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #40 of 305 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 58 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Clinch · hn · 2026-08-18 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Marky · hn · 2026-04-16 · 75 upvotes · similarity 0.44
- Mission Control · hn · 2026-02-26 · 45 upvotes · similarity 0.43
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