Beads Dependency Tracking

First-class dependency management for issue tracking with visual graphs and blocking detection.

Overview

Beads treats dependencies as a core primitive, not an afterthought. The system supports:

• 4 dependency types: blocks, related, parent-child, discovered-from
• Bidirectional tracking: What blocks this issue, what this issue blocks
• Cycle detection: Prevents circular dependency chains
• Visual trees: ASCII and Mermaid.js graph outputs
• Blocking analysis: Find issues that can't proceed due to dependencies

Dependencies are the key to intelligent work prioritization and unblocking workflows.

Canonical Sources