My workflow tends to be very simple: start a session; ask the agent "what's next", which prompts it to check beads; and more often than not ask it to just pick up whichever bead "makes more sense".

In claude I have a code-reviewer agent, and I remind cc often to run the code reviewer before closing any bead. It works surprisingly well.

I used to monitor context and start afresh when it reached ~80%, but I stopped doing that. Compacting is not as disruptive as it used to be, and with beads agents don't lose track.

I spent some time trying to measure the productivity change due to beads, analysing cc and codex logs and linking them to deltas and commits in git [1]. But I did not fully believe the result (5x increase when using beads, there has to be some hidden variable) and I moved on to other things.

Part of the complexity is that these days I often work on two or three projects at the same time, so attribution is difficult.

[1] Analysis code is at https://github.com/juanre/agent-taylor