I built myself a tool that does something quite similar. It's a single no-dependency Python script that parses "tasks.md" in the root of the repo which contains a Markdown table of tasks, then has basic support for BLOCKED/READY/DONE/CANCELLED, dependencies, titles, tags, etc.

For a project that is just for me, it's exactly what I need – dependency tracking and not much more, stored offline with the code. Almost all of the code for it was written by Gemini.