team.management vs Beads.
Beads solves agent amnesia — a git-backed issue graph that survives across sessions. team.management solves agent drift — enforcement within them. They are different problems, and you can fix both at once.
What Beads is
Beads is Steve Yegge’s answer to the “50 First Dates” problem: coding agents that wake up every session with no memory. It keeps a graph-based issue tracker in git — issues, dependencies, status — that agents read and write, so context compounds instead of evaporating. It moved to the gastownhall org and sits at ≈25k stars (July 2026), with Gas Town (≈17k stars) building a multi-agent workspace manager on top.
What team.management is
team.management is an open-source protocol engine inside Claude Code working the other axis: not what the agent knows, but what it may do right now. Steps, modes, and gates are held by the engine — outside the context window — and a PreToolUse hook applies them to every tool call (the DAIC loop). Perfect recall doesn’t grant permission.
The core difference — remembering vs constraining
Beads makes the agent know more: what was decided, what’s blocked on what, what happened last week. team.management makes the agent able to do less at any given moment: no edits during discussion, no completion without review. A perfect memory doesn’t stop an agent from cutting corners, and a gate doesn’t tell it what happened last week. Different problems, different layers.
And yes — you can uninstall the gates whenever you like. They bind the agent per tool call, never you. Advice in a prompt binds no one at all.
| Beads | team.management | |
|---|---|---|
| Core job | Persistent memory: git-backed issue graph across sessions | Enforced process: gated protocol steps within work |
| Data model | Graph of issues + dependencies, owned locally in git | Task files + protocol state; issues linked to GitHub/GitLab/Jira |
| Runtime enforcement | None — it informs, it doesn’t gate | PreToolUse hook gates tools by DAIC mode |
| Cross-session story | Excellent — that’s the product | Process-scoped: manifests, work logs, audit logs per task |
| Multi-agent | Gas Town builds workspaces on Beads | AI providers (Codex/Antigravity) join reviews; one lead agent per task |
| Repository | github.com/gastownhall/beads | github.com/TeamManagementPlugin/claude-plugin |
| Price & license | Free, open source | Free, MIT |
Memory below, rails above
Run them as one stack: Beads carries the backlog and the cross-session context; each item of that backlog runs as a team.management task with enforced steps. The graph remembers, the gates hold — neither replaces the other. If amnesia is your only pain, Beads alone cures it. The day you stop watching every session, add the rails.
FAQ
Do Beads and team.management overlap?
Less than the category suggests. Beads is a memory substrate: issues, dependencies, and context that persist between sessions. team.management is a process layer: what the agent may do right now, given the step it’s in. The overlap is issue tracking, where team.management links tasks to GitHub/GitLab/Jira rather than owning a graph database.
Can they run together?
Yes, naturally: Beads carries the backlog and cross-session context; each item of work then runs as a team.management task with enforced steps. Neither tool fights the other’s layer.
Doesn’t team.management also preserve context?
It preserves process context — task files, context manifests, work logs, protocol audit logs — which covers the lifecycle of a task. Beads goes further as a general memory graph across everything the agent touches. If cross-session memory is your primary pain, Beads is the stronger dedicated answer.
Facts and figures on this page are as of July 2026, verified against the sources linked inline. If you’re reading this much later — check the sources.