zlacker

LLMs famously don't have a memory - every time you start a new conversation with the you are effectively resetting them to a blank slate.

Giving them somewhere to jot down notes is a surprisingly effective way of working around this limitation.

The simplest version of this is to let them read and write files. I often tell my coding agents "append things you figure out to notes.md as you are working" - then in future sessions I can tell them to read or search that file.

Beads is a much more structured way of achieving the same thing. I expect it works well partly because LLM training data makes them familiar with the issue/bug tracker style of working already.

>>simonw+(OP)
Thanks! It is the structure that matters here, then. Just like you, I ask my agents to keep updating a markdown file locally and use it as a reference during working sessions. This mechanism has worked well for me.

I even occasionally ask agents to move some learnings back to my Claude.md or Agents.md file.

I'm curious whether complicating this behaviour with a database integration would further abstract the work in progress. Are we heading down a slippery slope?

>>simonw+(OP)
I’ve been using beads for a few projects and I find it superior to spec kit or any other form of structured workflow.

I also find it faster to use. I tell the agent the problem, ask them to write a set of tasks using beads, it creates the tasks and it creates the “depends on” tree structure. Then I tell it to work on one task at a time and require my review before continuing.

The added benefit is the agent doesn’t need to hold so much context in order to work on the tasks. I can start a new session and tell it to continue the tasks.

Most of this can work without beads but it’s so easy to use it’s the only spec tool I’ve found that has stuck.

>>simonw+(OP)
I often have them append to notes, too, but also often ask them to deduplicate those notes, without which they can become quite redundant. Maybe redundancy doesn't matter to the AI because I've got tokens to burn, but it feels like the right thing to do. Particularly because sometimes I read the notes myself.

>>qudat+ib
Do you find that it interferes with coding agents’ built-in task management features? I tried beads a few weeks ago and Claude exhibited some strange behavior there. I’ll have to try it again, everything is changing so quickly.

>>simonw+(OP)
Using Claude code recently I was quite impressed by the TODO tool. It seemed like such a banal solution to the problem of keeping agents on track. But it works so well and allows even much smaller models to do well on long horizon tasks.

Even more impressive lately is how good the latest models are without anything keeping them on track!

>>qudat+ib
Is there a good way to use beads without pushing your .beads dir upstream?

>>wredco+8D
Add the .beads directory to .gitignore and always make edits on that same machine.

>>simonw+HM
Is there a good way to put it in a separate repo?