bd ready

bd ready — the claimable frontier of the work graph, and the single computation the whole product is built around. The docs define it precisely: “open beads with no open blockers, excluding anything in progress, blocked, deferred, or held by a gate. Agents never scan the whole tracker; they ask for the frontier and claim atomically.”

bd ready --json            # the claimable frontier, machine-readable
bd ready --claim --json    # atomically claim the first match
bd ready --mol <mol-id>    # which steps of one molecule can run right now

The frontier is derived, never stored, so it is correct the instant a blocker closes — “closing bd-a1b2 makes bd-c3d4 ready; nothing needs re-planning.” That is the sentence that makes this a store capability rather than an orchestration one: the graph answers “what next?” without anybody scheduling, which is exactly the split beads’ charter draws when it says the orchestration layer owns “task assignment strategy” and beads does not.

--claim matters as much as the query. It sets assignee and in_progress in one atomic write, so two agents polling the same frontier cannot both take the same bead. Combined with content-hash IDs (no renumbering on merge), that is the entire coordination protocol between parallel agents — no lock server, no assignment queue.

Not gating the frontier is as deliberate as gating it: only blocks and workflow edges hold work back, while discovered-from and related record meaning without hiding anything (beads-dep).

Maps to no canonical SDLC stage — it advances nothing; it decides what may be advanced next.

Cross-store equivalent

seeds-ready computes the same predicate over a JSONL file, and the convergence is the strongest signal the store layer produces: two tools built independently for the same job both landed on the unblocked frontier as the dispatch primitive. They differ at the edges — beads excludes gated and deferred beads and can scope to a molecule; seeds adds --respect-schedule for warren’s parked/scheduled keys.

See Also

• beads-update — the claim, if not done inline with --claim.
• beads-dep · beads-gate — what holds a bead back from this frontier.
• warren · bernstein — the orchestration layer that consumes a frontier like this one.
• pattern-autonomous-loop — the pattern this feeds.