ticket
The git-backed issue tracker for AI agents. Rooted in the Unix Philosophy, tk is inspired by Joe Armstrong's Minimal Viable Program with additional quality of life features for managing and querying against complex issue dependency graphs.
tk was written as a full replacement for beads. It shares many similar commands but without the need for keeping a SQLite file in sync or a rogue background daemon mangling your changes. It ships with a migrate-beads command to make this a smooth transition.
Tickets are markdown files with YAML frontmatter in .tickets/. This allows AI agents to easily search them for relevant content without dumping ten thousand character JSONL lines into their context window.
Using ticket IDs as file names also allows IDEs to quickly navigate to the ticket for you. For example, you might run git log in your terminal and see something like:
nw-5c46: add SSE connection management
VS Code allows you to Ctrl+Click or Cmd+Click the ID and jump directly to the file to read the details.
Install
Homebrew (macOS/Linux):
brew tap wedow/tools brew install ticket
Arch Linux (AUR):
yay -S ticket # or paru, etc.From source (auto-updates on git pull):
git clone https://github.com/wedow/ticket.git cd ticket && ln -s "$PWD/ticket" ~/.local/bin/tk
Or just copy ticket to somewhere in your PATH.
Requirements
tk is a portable bash script requiring only coreutils, so it works out of the box on any POSIX system with bash installed. The query command requires jq. Uses rg (ripgrep) if available, falls back to grep.
Agent Setup
Add this line to your CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md:
This project uses a CLI ticket system for task management. Run `tk help` when you need to use it.
Claude Opus picks it up naturally from there. Other models may need additional guidance.
Usage
tk - minimal ticket system with dependency tracking Usage: tk <command> [args] Commands: create [title] [options] Create ticket, prints ID -d, --description Description text --design Design notes --acceptance Acceptance criteria -t, --type Type (bug|feature|task|epic|chore) [default: task] -p, --priority Priority 0-4, 0=highest [default: 2] -a, --assignee Assignee [default: git user.name] --external-ref External reference (e.g., gh-123, JIRA-456) --parent Parent ticket ID --tags Comma-separated tags (e.g., --tags ui,backend,urgent) start <id> Set status to in_progress close <id> Set status to closed reopen <id> Set status to open status <id> <status> Update status (open|in_progress|closed) dep <id> <dep-id> Add dependency (id depends on dep-id) dep tree [--full] <id> Show dependency tree (--full disables dedup) dep cycle Find dependency cycles in open tickets undep <id> <dep-id> Remove dependency link <id> <id> [id...] Link tickets together (symmetric) unlink <id> <target-id> Remove link between tickets ls|list [--status=X] [-a X] [-T X] List tickets ready [-a X] [-T X] List open/in-progress tickets with deps resolved blocked [-a X] [-T X] List open/in-progress tickets with unresolved deps closed [--limit=N] [-a X] [-T X] List recently closed tickets (default 20, by mtime) show <id> Display ticket edit <id> Open ticket in $EDITOR add-note <id> [text] Append timestamped note (or pipe via stdin) query [jq-filter] Output tickets as JSON, optionally filtered migrate-beads Import tickets from .beads/issues.jsonl Searches parent directories for .tickets/ (override with TICKETS_DIR env var) Supports partial ID matching (e.g., 'tk show 5c4' matches 'nw-5c46')
Testing
The tests are written in the Behavior-Driven Development library behave and require Python.
If you have uv installed simply:
Migrating from Beads
tk migrate-beads # review new files if you like git status # check state matches expectations tk ready tk blocked # compare against bd ready bd blocked # all good, let's go git rm -rf .beads git add .tickets git commit -am "ditch beads"
For a thorough system-wide Beads cleanup, see banteg's uninstall script.
License
MIT