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.
MojoTech fork of ticket project from original repo: https://github.com/wedow/ticket
Devenv:
Add the following input to your devenv.yaml file:
inputs:
ticket:
url: github:mojotech/ticket
Then add ticket to your devshell.nix:
{ inputs, pkgs, ... }:
{
packages = [
inputs.ticket.packages.${pkgs.system}.default
];
}
Nix (flakes):
# Run directly
nix run github:mojotech/ticket
# Install to profile
nix profile install github:mojotech/ticket
# Or add to your flake.nix inputsFrom source (auto-updates on git pull):
git clone https://github.com/mojotech/ticket.git
cd ticket && ln -s "$PWD/ticket" ~/.local/bin/tkOr just copy ticket to somewhere in your PATH.
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.
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.
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 (advisory, for epic/subtask hierarchy)
--dep Initial dependency (ticket must be completed first)
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)
undep <id> <dep-id> Remove dependency
link <id> <id> [id...] Link tickets together (symmetric)
unlink <id> <target-id> Remove link between tickets
ls [--status=X] List tickets
ready List open/in-progress tickets with deps resolved
blocked List open/in-progress tickets with unresolved deps
closed [--limit=N] 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
--version, -V Print version
Tickets stored as markdown files in .tickets/
Supports partial ID matching (e.g., 'tk show 5c4' matches 'nw-5c46')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.
MIT