bd show <id> — full bead detail plus its audit trail: fields, typed dependency edges, labels, comments, metadata, and the version history behind it. --json is the agent path, and the docs recommend narrowing it — bd show <id> --json | jq '.[0] | {id,title,metadata,description,notes}' — precisely so an agent reads the structured execution metadata before the prose.
Two relatives share the page: bd children lists the child beads of a parent (the hierarchy view, complementing beads-epic), and bd history shows the version history of one bead, which exists because every write is a Dolt commit — a per-issue changelog nobody had to build.
A pure read command; maps to no canonical SDLC stage.
See Also
- beads-list · beads-query — the plural and filtered reads.
- beads-graph — the same relationships rendered as a graph.
- beads-vc — the database-wide version-control view
bd historyis a slice of.