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An Update on Beans

An increasing number of folks have been asking about the state of Beans, and instead of answering each one individually, I thought it would be best to write a quick update here.

Yes, Beans is still an active project.

But — and you knew a but was coming — there are some caveats.

Beans UI and Agent Orchestration

Around March this year, I started building Beans into a full-on agent orchestration tool, patterned after my preferences in this space. What’s currently on main is actually pretty great, and I was using it for my own projects and loving it; but in the meantime unfortunately Anthropic (which was my primary provider of agentic goods, and the only one supported in Beans UI) have declared war on claude -p usage, which is essential for orchestrators like this.

On top of that, I am aware that maybe this orchestration tool simply made Beans just a little bit too big. An argument can be made that Beans should just focus on Markdown-based issue management and nothing else.

So I’ve decided to pull this orchestration tool from Beans, and maybe release it as a separate project at some point in the future; but before I do that, I want to see how things pan out between Anthropic and the rest of us. There’s a potential future scenario where I give this orchestrator a big upgrade to work with other agents, too (I myself have recently switched away from Anthropic to OpenAI), but since I’m also very busy with getting Chatto off the ground, it’ll be a while until I find the time.

The TUI Uncertainty

I have come to understand that for many people, the primary reason why they enjoy using Beans is the built-in TUI, which I appreciate, but also surprises me. I personally don’t use the TUI at all, since I either inspect my issues in my code editor, or — in certain very vibe-mode cases — not at all. Very subjectively, if I wanted to interact with my Beans issues through some kind of UI, it would need to be web-based. An implementation of that is part of the agentic orchestration tool that I mentioned above, but since that’s now on hold, I don’t know when or if that will see the light of day.

The Skill Issue

But the biggest realization I am having to come to terms with is that maybe, maybe, six+ months after its inception, Beans — at least in its current shape — might be just a little bit redundant. Think about what Beans actually is:

  • it manages Markdown files with typed frontmatter
  • it injects a prompt so your agent knows how to work with it
  • it provides a TUI to display and interact with these files

The TUI aside, I think it’s safe to say that most of that Beans does could be replaced with a good skill and a generic tool that can manage Markdown files. And that’s exactly the kind of direction that I might go in the future, once I have a little more time to experiment with these things.

I even have some fun ideas for the TUI in this scenario! So please do stay tuned, TUI fans.

In Summary

Yes, Beans remains alive and kicking, even if I can’t currently give it a lot of attention. If you have a PR waiting for a review, I apologize, but would also very kindly remind you that the project’s README says:

This project currently does not accept contributions — it’s just way too early for that! But if you do have suggestions or feedback, please feel free to open an issue.

Either way, I’d like to ask you for just a little more patience while my focus is on other work. Good things are ahead, in Beans and elsewhere.