Introduction

seeds is an issue tracker for AI coding agents that stores each work item (“a seed”) as facts in a quipu knowledge graph. It answers the verbs agents already type against bd and br (create, show, list, ready, count, update, close, dep, comments), with --json output in the same shape, so an agent does not have to learn anything new.

Status: the v0.1 core runs. Every verb works against a local quipu store, a repo-local pendant or a quipu server, sd sync merges them, the core builds for WebAssembly, and --at pins work. beads sync and formulas (through shuttle) are not built yet. See What is built for exactly what runs today.

The name

A quipucamayoc, the keeper of the quipus, did arithmetic on a yupana, a counting board of compartments, by moving seeds or pebbles across it. When the count was settled it was knotted into the quipu, the permanent record.

The stack already uses that picture: quipu is the record, yupana is the board. Seeds are the counters moved across the board before they become knots, which is what a work item is: something in motion that ends up in the record.

Why use it

• Pin one item, not the whole database. A snapshot-versioned tracker can tell you what the whole database looked like at a commit. seeds can tell you what one item looked like at a transaction, while the rest of the project keeps moving. See Pinning.
• No commit step, no server lifecycle. Every write is a quipu transaction and the transaction id is the cursor. There is no dirty state to commit, no garbage collection to schedule and no SQL server to start and stop.
• Identity is built in. A project is a named graph, and its IRI is its identity. There is no separate project-id row to drift out of sync.
• Governed writes. Every write is validated against the seeds profile (camayoc’s governance constraints plus the tracker’s own), so a seed with an unknown status or a dependency on nothing is refused at the door. See The storage model.
• Share a ledger like a package. A project’s graph, its shapes and the queries that define “ready” can travel as a pendant with separately registered stored queries. See Sharing a ledger.

Where it fits

seeds is the beads replacement for the quipu stack: bd callers are redirected to sd by desire-path, and the verbs they type answer with --json in the same shape. Why facts, not snapshots explains the storage design the features above rest on.