Anyone else reaching for a bd search?

[riordanpawley]

Claude searching with mcp bd list uses 30k tokens instantly

[peterloron]

That would be nice, but you can always do something like:

!bd list | grep foo

I've generally been running without the mcp to save the context space

[steveyegge]

Yikes. How many issues are in your database?

[riordanpawley]

a fair few haha. I run a /retrospective command before starting a new session and it creates timestamped .md files. Then I have a command that I run periodically to extract patterns from those retrospectives and create beads to solve any problematic patterns. I'm also using beads to store all related context for each issue which can be a lot.

[steveyegge]

Welp, time to focus on performance for a while. Glad you're liking it!

[steveyegge]

Good call though; I'll go ahead and implement an initialbd search and we can tweak it as needed.

[steveyegge]

@riordanpawley We now have a bd search command that should help with the MCP context problem.

Commit: 1806183 - feat: Add bd search command for efficient text queries (#347)

Changes:

• ✅ cmd/bd/search.go - 253 lines (new command implementation)
• ✅ commands/search.md - 89 lines (documentation)
• ✅ .beads/beads.jsonl - Updated from testing

What was delivered:

1. New bd search command - Efficient text search across title, description, and ID
2. Default limit of 50 - Solves the 30k token MCP issue from Anyone else reaching for a bd search? #347
3. Smart filtering - Supports --status, --assignee, --type, --label
4. Dual mode support - Works with both daemon and direct modes
5. Complete documentation - Help text and markdown docs
6. Tested and verified - All functionality working correctly

Ready to use:
bd search "performance"
bd search "database" --status open --label backend
bd search "bd-5q" # Partial ID search

The feature addresses the discussion issue perfectly - Claude/LLMs using MCP can now
search efficiently without consuming massive context.

It'll be available in v0.24.1 when we release, or you can build your own binary in the meantime.

Thanks for the suggestion, and let me know if it can use any improvements!

[riordanpawley]

thank you!

[steveyegge]

@riordanpawley this is now live in v0.24.1 -- just upgrade and you'll have it!

[riordanpawley]

Thank you!