bones

bones is a CRDT-native issue tracker for distributed human and agent collaboration.

It is designed for teams where multiple people and coding agents are editing the same backlog concurrently, and where machine-readable CLI output matters as much as human UX.

Installation

cargo install bones-cli

This installs the bn command-line tool.

Quick start

# initialize a repo
bn init

# set identity
export AGENT=my-agent

# create work items
bn create --title "Add retry budget to queue writer" --kind task --label reliability

# get prioritized next items
bn next
bn next 3

# search
bn search "retry budget"

# machine-readable output
bn triage --format json
bn search auth --format json

Shell completions

bn completions bash > ~/.local/share/bash-completion/completions/bn
bn completions zsh > ~/.zfunc/_bn
bn completions fish > ~/.config/fish/completions/bn.fish

Features

• CRDT event log: append-only writes, deterministic merge, no conflicts
• Hybrid search: lexical BM25 + semantic embeddings + structural graph proximity fused with RRF
• Graph-aware triage: PageRank, critical-path, dependency-weighted scoring
• Duplicate detection: automatic on create, explicit via bn triage similar
• Machine-readable: --format json on every command for agent workflows
• TUI: interactive interface alongside the CLI

Documentation

See the bones repository for full documentation, including:

• Architecture overview
• Agent workflow guide
• Simulation testing details
• Migration from beads