Beans for VS Code 🫘

Appearance

Core features ​

The Beans sidebar contains seven panels:

  • Drafts - Beans in draft status, needing refinement
  • Open Beans - Active beans (todo and in-progress)
  • Completed - Successfully finished beans
  • Scrapped - Abandoned beans
  • Search - Full-text search results with context menus
  • Details - Rich webview showing the selected bean's content, properties, and relationships
  • Help - Quick access to documentation, output channel, and settings

On first launch, the sidebar defaults are tuned to prioritize active work. After first use, VS Code persists your panel expand/collapse state and sizing, so you can resize panes once and keep your preferred layout.

You can toggle item counts in panel headers via the beans.view.showCounts setting.

Hierarchical Organization ​

Create structured workflows with parent-child relationships:

text
Milestone: v1.0 Release
└── Epic: User Authentication
    ├── Feature: Login flow
    │   ├── Task: Design login UI
    │   └── Task: Implement JWT tokens
    └── Feature: Password reset

Drag & Drop: Drag a child bean onto a parent to create the relationship.

Status Workflow ​

Beans flow through statuses:

text
draft → todo → in-progress → completed
                ↓
            scrapped
  • draft: Needs refinement
  • todo: Ready to start
  • in-progress: Being worked on
  • completed: Done
  • scrapped: Won't do

Dependency Tracking ​

Mark beans as blocking others:

text
Bean A: "Set up database" (blocking → Bean B)
Bean B: "Implement login" (blocked-by ← Bean A)

Use "Edit Blocking Relationships" to manage dependencies.

Details View ​

Click any bean in the sidebar to open its Details panel. The Details view provides:

  • Rendered markdown body with full formatting support
  • Interactive checklists - Click checkboxes to toggle completion directly in the view; changes persist to the bean file
  • Editable properties - Status, type, priority displayed as actionable elements
  • Relationship navigation - Click parent beans, children, or blocking relationships to navigate between beans
  • Browsing history - Use the back button to return to previously viewed beans
  • Live updates - File watcher detects external edits and refreshes the view

Copilot Start Work ​

From the Details view, click the chat icon to launch a Copilot-assisted workflow for the selected bean. Choose from six templates:

  • Assess current status - Get Copilot's analysis of the bean's progress
  • Determine remaining steps - Ask Copilot what work remains
  • Close and commit - Get guidance on completing and committing the bean
  • Export to GitHub issue - Draft a GitHub issue from the bean's content
  • Set in-progress - Mark the bean as in-progress with Copilot assistance
  • Flesh out specs - Have Copilot help expand the bean's description and requirements

File Watching ​

The extension automatically watches the .beans/ directory for changes and refreshes tree views when files change. This detects edits from the CLI, other editors, or git operations.

The debounce interval is configurable via beans.fileWatcher.debounceMs (default: 20 seconds).

Corrupt Bean Detection ​

The extension automatically attempts to repair corrupted beans by reviewing the file's Git history. If it's unable to to repair the bean, it will be moved to .beans/.quarantine for manual editing and restoration.

  • Filter by Status: Show only specific statuses
  • Filter by Type: Show only bugs, features, etc.
  • Filter by Tag: Custom tag filtering
  • Full-Text Search: Search across titles and bodies
  • Sort Modes: By status, priority, updated date, created date, or ID