gastownhall/beads · info

title must be 500 characters or less

Error message

title must be 500 characters or less

What it means

Inline huh form validation error: the Title exceeds 500 characters (len(s) > 500, bytes). The form re-prompts for a shorter title.

Source

Thrown at cmd/bd/create_form.go:287

		huh.NewOption("P2 - Medium (default)", "2"),
		huh.NewOption("P3 - Low", "3"),
		huh.NewOption("P4 - Backlog", "4"),
	}

	// Build the form
	form := huh.NewForm(
		huh.NewGroup(
			huh.NewInput().
				Title("Title").
				Description("Brief summary of the issue (required)").
				Placeholder("e.g., Fix authentication bug in login handler").
				Value(&raw.Title).
				Validate(func(s string) error {
					if strings.TrimSpace(s) == "" {
						return fmt.Errorf("title is required")
					}
					if len(s) > 500 {
						return fmt.Errorf("title must be 500 characters or less")
					}
					return nil
				}),

			huh.NewText().
				Title("Description").
				Description("Detailed context about the issue").
				Placeholder("Explain why this issue exists and what needs to be done...").
				CharLimit(5000).
				Value(&raw.Description),

			huh.NewSelect[string]().
				Title("Type").
				Description("Categorize the kind of work").
				Options(typeOptions...).
				Value(&raw.IssueType),

			huh.NewSelect[string]().

View on GitHub (pinned to 71377f2769)

Solutions

1. Shorten the title to under 500 characters
2. Move detail into the Description field instead of the title
3. Beware multi-byte characters — byte length, not rune length, is checked

Example fix

// before
title := "Fix authentication bug in login handler " + strings.Repeat("detail ", 90)
// after
title := "Fix authentication bug in login handler" // detail goes in Description

if len(title) > 500 { return fmt.Errorf("title is %d bytes; must be <= 500", len(title)) }

When it happens

Trigger: Submitting the create-form Title field with a string longer than 500 bytes (note: multi-byte UTF-8 characters count per byte via len).

Common situations: Pasting a long commit message or sentence as the title; CJK/emoji titles hitting the byte limit sooner than expected.

Related errors

• title is required
• agents file name exceeds 255 characters
• %w: update title: %w
• close reason is terse (%d chars); aim for 20+ characters des
• no store is open for this workspace

AI-assisted analysis of gastownhall/beads@71377f2769 (2026-08-30). Data as JSON: /api/errors/7a8863bf1ce9aa55. Report an issue: GitHub.