(2025-12-15) Beads Memory For Your Coding Agents

Paddo: Beads: Memory for Your Coding Agents. In my previous post on Steve Yegge, I covered his “divers and CNC machines” thesis: current agents burn context like oxygen, and the future is orchestrated swarms. His new project, Beads, is a step toward that future.

The problem it solves: coding agents have amnesia. Every session is 50 First Dates.

The Markdown Nightmare

Before Beads, Yegge spent a month drowning in markdown files. Hundreds of them, accumulating...

All they know is what’s on disk. If you got competing documents, obsolete documents, conflicting documents, ambiguous documents - they get dementia.
— Steve Yegge

The solution: addressable work items. Every task gets an ID, a priority, dependencies, an audit trail. Not a wiki. Not scattered notes. An issue tracker.

Why Git

Beads stores everything in Git. This seems weird for an ephemeral issue tracker, but the reasoning is solid

There’s a SQLite cache for fast queries, but the source of truth is version-controlled markdown. The AI designed it that way when Yegge asked what it wanted.

Current Work, Not Future Planning

Current work: what you care about right now, what just finished and might break, what’s blocked. This is Beads

What Beads doesn't do

Beads isn’t a planning tool, a PRD generator, or Jira. It’s orchestration for what you’re working on today and this week.

Land the Plane

*The pattern that sold me: “land the plane.”

At the end of every session, Yegge tells his agent: “Let’s land the plane.” This triggers a scripted cleanup*

What’s Next?

The holy grail: wake up, ask your agents “what’s next?”, and they know.

Running in Shoes

The broader thesis is the same as my previous Yegge post: bigger context windows aren’t the answer. Better orchestration is. Beads is a piece of that puzzle: persistent memory that survives session boundaries.