I'm aware I've been building my own alternative to Beads for weeks now. the instructions.md file and something like Beads is epic.
https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails
I didnt like how married to git hooks beads was, so I made my own thats primarily a SQLite workhorse. Been using it just the same as I have used Beads, works just as good, drastically less code. I added a concept called "gates" to stop the AI model from just closing tasks without any testing or validation (human or otherwise) because it was another pain point for me with Beads.
I fully sync the issues to GitHub to boot.
https://github.com/Giancarlos/guardrails/issues
Works both ways, to GitHub, from GitHub. When you claim a task, its supposed to update on GitHub too (though looking at the last one I claimed, doesnt seem to be 100% foolproof yet).
Why have the issues tracked on the file system at all if it can be represented in Github issues and be accessed via tool calls? Also how are you handling sub task management, are you able to link closed checkboxes in the Github issues or?