Beads Blows Up

Three weeks after launch, Beads has gone from "pooped out in four or five days of feverish coding" to a drop-in replacement for the markdown-TODO files every 2025 coding agent ships with — twenty-seven PRs merged in twenty-seven days, half a dozen heart-attack bugs fixed daily. The essay runs on three verdicts. The architectural verdict: Git + JSONL + a SQLite cache hydrated on demand was right from day one and hasn't had to change — it's "practical magic," feels like there's a central managed server but there isn't one. The language verdict: Go beats TypeScript for vibe coding; TypeScript agents make sixteen copies of the same interface and call Partial<Omit<AsyncCallback<T>>> wrapper factories, Go is brutally simple and the worst it ever gets is mediocre. (Earned — 350,000 lines of TypeScript in the preceding 30 days.) And the addiction warning: Beads kills friction in session handoff, so you fire up more agents, reach a point where one is always waiting with dopamine, and then "you're stuck." Along the way the essay introduces Landing the Plane, the end-of-session prompt that went on to become part of the standard vibe-coding playbook.