Building Apps with AI: How beads Changed My Development Workflow

Part 1 of 2: From Spec Documents to Living Issue Trackers

TL;DR

I built a real estate comparison app using Claude Code and a tool called

Source Code: , which formalizes SDD into a six-phase workflow:

SDD frameworks like agent-os are great for complex features that need upfront design. But what if you want to skip straight to task management with automatic prioritization?

Enter beads: Task-First with Graph-Based Dependencies

3. Explicit Dependencies = Enforced Execution Order

bd dep add mission-house-abc mission-house-xyz

# "abc depends on xyz" (xyz blocks abc)

This isn't prose that might be ignored - it's a graph edge. The AI literally cannot see abc in bd ready until xyz is closed.

Quick Start: Installing beads

For macOS users:

brew tap steveyegge/beads

brew install bd



# Initialize in your project

cd your-project

bd init

Other options: npm install -g @beads/bd or go install github.com/steveyegge/beads/cmd/bd@latest

That's it. You now have a .beads directory in your repo.

The App: Mission House

Before diving deeper into beads, let me briefly introduce what we built. Mission House is a property comparison tool for Melbourne house hunters. It helps answer questions like:

• Which catchment schools serve this address?


• How long is the commute to the CBD?


• How do these 4 properties compare on a radar chart?

Every arrow represents a bd dep add command. The AI knows it can't work on "Web Scraper" until "URL Input Form" is done.

What's Coming in Part 2

In the next post, I'll dive deep into:

1. 
   The JSONL Advantage - How storing issues in plain text gives AI assistants "long memory"


2. 
   Workflow Patterns - Epics → Features → Tasks hierarchy


3. 
   Real Issue Examples - Actual JSON from our project


4. 
   beads vs. Spec-Driven Development - A detailed comparison


5. 
   The Drawbacks - What didn't work so well


6. 
   Advanced Features - Tombstones, sync branches, and multi-session workflows

Key Takeaways

1. 
   Task-first vs. spec-first - beads lets you create issues directly; SDD requires specs first


2. 
   Graph-based dependencies - Explicit edges, not prose to interpret


3. 
   bd ready is the killer feature - Automatic prioritization via graph traversal


4. 
   Enforced execution order - Blocked tasks are invisible until unblocked

Continue to Part 2: Deep Dive into beads Workflow →