So I slapped together my own Beads implementation (https://codeberg.org/mutablecc/dingles) over a day or two. Probably has bugs, and I'm sure race conditions if you tried to use with Gas Town, and likely does not scale. But it has the minimum functionality needed to create and track issues and sync them (locally and remotely, either via normal merge, or a dedicated ticket branch). No SQL, no extra features, just JSONL and Git. Threw a whole large software project at it, and the AI took to it like a duck to water, used it to make epics for the whole project, methodically worked through them all, dependencies first, across multiple context sessions. The paradigm of making tools the AI wants to use is clearly a winner.