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Beads v0.62.0 — Standalone & The Road to 1.0

March 21, 2026

Beads v0.62 is the release where beads becomes fully standalone. Gas Town-specific concepts have been systematically removed from the codebase — no more GUPP references, polecat terminology, HOP fields, or hardcoded ~/gt/ paths. Beads is beads. It works with Gas Town, but it doesn't need it.

The other headline: embedded Dolt support has made dramatic progress. DoltHub's coffeegoddd landed 73 commits advancing in-process Dolt — the last major gate before v1.0.0.

The Road to v1.0.0

We're actively targeting Beads v1.0.0. The gate is embedded Dolt completion — running Dolt in-process without a separate server. This matters because standalone users (the majority) should get a zero-config experience: bd init, bd create, done. No server to manage.

The embedded Dolt work is making excellent progress. 73 commits from the Dolt team landed in this release alone, covering create, list, update, close, show, delete, search, query, label, gate, graph, views, and more. A shared issueops package now provides transaction-based operations used by both the server and embedded backends.

Once embedded Dolt covers the full command surface and standalone users report a smooth experience, we ship 1.0. We estimate this is weeks away, not months.

Beads Is Now Standalone

The biggest internal change in v0.62 is the systematic removal of Gas Town-specific concepts:

  • GUPP references removed from all code and docs
  • Polecat/crew/overseer terminology replaced with generic types
  • HOP schema fields removed from the database schema
  • Agent-as-bead subsystem removed entirely
  • Patrol molecule references removed from commands
  • Role templates (deacon, witness, refinery) removed
  • Hardcoded ~/gt/ paths replaced with config-driven paths
  • BEADS_ACTOR is now the primary env var (BD_ACTOR remains as deprecated fallback)

Beads integrates with Gas Town through clean interfaces, not internal coupling. This separation is prerequisite for a credible 1.0 — beads should work identically whether you're running a full Gas Town, using it with another orchestrator, or just tracking issues solo.

Custom Status Categories

Beads has always let you define custom statuses. Now you can assign them to categories that control behavior:

bd config set status.custom "in_review:active,qa_testing:wip,archived:done,on_hold:frozen"
  • active statuses appear in bd ready (available for claiming)
  • wip statuses are in-progress (shown in lists, excluded from ready)
  • done statuses are excluded from bd list by default
  • frozen statuses are excluded from both

The new bd statuses command lists all statuses with their icons and categories. --json for programmatic use.

Azure DevOps Integration

The fifth tracker plugin: bd ado sync, bd ado status, bd ado projects. Follows the same pattern as GitHub, GitLab, Jira, and Linear — configure your ADO org and project, and work items sync bidirectionally. This was a community-requested integration driven by enterprise users.

New Commands

bd note <id> <text> — Shorthand for appending notes without bd update --note ceremony. Small ergonomic win that adds up.

bd statuses — Lists all built-in and custom statuses with icons, categories, and descriptions.

Audit Logging

Status, assignee, and priority changes are now logged to .beads/interactions.jsonl. Close reasons are captured in the audit trail. This log survives Dolt GC flatten — even if you aggressively compact your database history, the audit trail persists as a flat file.

Dolt Reliability

  • ServerMode enum consolidates Dolt server ownership inference into four clean modes (Auto, External, Shared, Embedded), replacing ad-hoc string checks
  • Windows lifecycle — stale PID/port files cleaned up; false "failed to stop" warnings eliminated
  • Hook preservation — bd init preserves ALL pre-existing git hooks, not just beads-managed ones
  • Shim timeout increased from 30s to 300s (configurable via BEADS_HOOK_TIMEOUT) for chained hooks
  • Concurrent schema init serialized with GET_LOCK to prevent journal corruption in multi-agent environments
  • External server safety — KillStaleServers respects server ownership, won't kill externally-managed servers
  • Doctor infinite loop — no longer triggers infinite Dolt server restart cycles

Embedded Dolt Progress

73 commits from DoltHub engineer coffeegoddd. Commands now working in embedded mode: create, list, update, close, show, delete, search, query, label, gate, promote, move, merge-slot, quick, diff, count, find-duplicates, graph, dep, duplicate, epic, supersede, swarm, and views/reports. The issueops package extraction means both server and embedded backends share the same transactional logic.

This is the most active area of development and the primary gate for v1.0.0.

Community

Contributors: coffeegoddd (Dustin Brown / DoltHub), matt wilkie (maphew), harry-miller-trimble, gzur, Algorune, sfncore, angelamayxie, paf0186, Patrick Farrell, Tim Visher.

Upgrade

brew upgrade bd
# or
curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/steveyegge/beads/main/scripts/install.sh | bash

Breaking change: BD_ACTOR is deprecated in favor of BEADS_ACTOR. The old variable still works as a fallback but will be removed in a future release.

Full changelog: CHANGELOG.md | GitHub release: v0.62.0