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🛸 Bead Me Up, Scotty

The free, open-source visual UI for Beads — Steve Yegge's graph-based issue tracker for AI coding agents. Brainstorm, create, and organize work in the same place your AI agent does.

⭐ Star the repo · 🌐 Website · ▶️ 2-minute demo

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What is this?

Beads (bd) is a distributed, graph-based issue tracker designed for AI coding agents. It ships a powerful CLI but no interactive visualizer that also lets you create work. Bead Me Up, Scotty is that visualizer: a fast, graph-aware task board for humans, sitting on top of a tracker built for agents.

It runs locally as a single-user web app. There's no server to host, no database to provision, and no new schema — the app shells out to your bd binary and treats bd as the single source of truth. If you don't have bd installed, it falls back to a built-in demo mode so you can explore every feature.

Why use it?

• See the graph. Beads' superpower is typed dependencies between issues. This app renders them as an interactive, draggable dependency graph.
• Work where your agent works. Your AI agent files and closes beads from the CLI; you triage, plan, and organize them from a board — same data, same instant.
• Zero lock-in. The app adds no persisted state of its own. Delete it and your beads are exactly where they were.
• Human-vs-agent attribution. Every bead and comment is stamped 👤 (human) or 🤖 (agent) so you can see who did what.

Start here

Page	What's inside
Getting Started	Install dependencies and run the app in 2 minutes.
Global Install and CLI	Install the scotty command and run it from any project.
Features	A tour of the board, epics, graph, comments, and more.
Architecture	How the app bridges to bd, the data model, and design decisions.
Configuration	Settings, environment variables, and attribution.
Demo Mode	The zero-setup, no-bd-required fallback.
FAQ	Common questions and troubleshooting.
Contributing	Project layout, conventions, and how to verify changes.

At a glance

• Stack: Next.js 16 (App Router) · React 19 · TypeScript · Tailwind v4 · shadcn/ui · TanStack Query · dnd-kit · @xyflow/react · Zod
• Runs on: localhost, single user, no auth
• Requires: Node 20+ (and the bd binary for live mode)
• License: MIT

Bead Me Up, Scotty is an independent project and is not affiliated with the Beads project. "Beads" and bd belong to their authors.