firstmate

What it is

You can run one coding agent easily. But the moment you want three project tasks done in parallel - fixes, investigations, plans, audits - you become a tab-juggler: babysitting sessions, copy-pasting context between repos, forgetting which terminal had the failing test.

firstmate flips the model. You talk to a single agent - the first mate - and it runs the crew for you: spawning autonomous agents in a visible session backend, giving each a clean git worktree, supervising them to completion, and handing you finished PRs, approved local merges, or standalone investigation reports. For larger fleets, you can opt in to persistent secondmates: second mates that are still ordinary direct reports, but run from their own isolated firstmate homes on this machine or another SSH-reachable host.

firstmate is not a model, not a harness, not a skill, not an MCP server, and not a CLI. firstmate is an agent distro for running a crew of agents. An agent distro is a portable directory of instructions, skills, tooling, policies, and state conventions that turns a general-purpose agent into a specialized one. There is no app to install: the cloned repo is the distro - AGENTS.md, bundled firstmate skills, and helper scripts that any terminal coding agent can follow. Launching a supported harness inside it for your primary session instantiates your first mate - and makes you the captain.

Features

• One liaison - you talk only to the first mate; it dispatches, supervises, escalates only real decisions, and reports plain outcomes.
• A visible crew - every crewmate works in its own tmux window or Herdr tab, or in an experimental Zellij tab, experimental cmux workspace, or experimental Orca terminal you can watch or type into; the first mate reconciles.
• Disposable worktrees - each task runs in a clean treehouse git worktree, or an Orca-managed worktree when backend=orca, so parallel work on one repo never collides.
• Two task shapes - ship tasks deliver authorized changes; scout tasks leave standalone investigation reports when the intake contract warrants separate research.
• Explicit project modes - each project ships via no-mistakes, direct-PR, or local-only, with an optional +yolo merge-autonomy flag, an optional branch=<prefix> override for the default fm/ ship-branch prefix, and an optional forge=gerrit binding under which the worker publishes a Gerrit change instead of opening a pull request.
• Optional secondmates - opt in to persistent second mates that run from isolated firstmate homes with their own FM_HOME, state, projects, and session lock, either locally or as a whole home on an SSH-reachable host, with guarded updates and recovery that never turns an unavailable remote route into a local replacement.
• Event-driven, zero-token supervision - a bash watcher sleeps on the fleet and wakes the first mate only when something needs you; verified primary harnesses also get a turn-end backstop that blocks or follows up on a blind stop when work is under way and supervision is not live.
• Optional Relay - opt in with one local .env pairing token so firstmate can answer your public mentions on X and Discord alike, act on normal reversible mention requests through the same lifecycle as chat requests, acknowledge spawned work, and post up to three public-safe completion follow-ups within seven days for genuine milestones and the final outcome without changing non-Relay behavior; a final reply promised in a thread becomes durable state that is reconciled from disk, so a restart or a compacted conversation cannot lose it; dry-run preview records would-be replies and dismissals locally before go-live.
• Strict project boundary - the first mate is read-only over your projects except for the narrow guarded and captain-approved operations authorized by hard rule 1, including fleet sync's guarded safe branch pruning; crewmates make every other project change behind the configured merge authority.
• Restart-proof - all state lives on disk and in the active session backend (tmux by hard default, herdr or cmux when selected or auto-detected, zellij/orca when explicitly selected); the next session reconciles after a restart, while ordinary supervision recovers confirmed-dead secondmate agents without waiting for one.

Full detail on every feature lives in docs/architecture.md.

Quick Start

Requirements

• A verified primary agent harness: Claude Code, Grok, Pi, pi-signed, Oh My Pi (omp), Codex, OpenCode, or Cursor Agent CLI.
• Git and the GitHub CLI, authenticated through gh auth login.
• The CLI and dependencies for your selected runtime backend; tmux is the reference default.

The first mate detects and offers to install supported missing tools after you approve. Backend-specific setup is linked in Documentation.

Recommended harnesses

Claude Code, Grok, and Pi are equal co-primary recommendations for running the primary firstmate session, with pi-signed supported as Pi's distinct signed-wrapper identity. Claude Code uses a tracked Stop hook for tokenless watcher re-arm and rewake, Grok uses background-notify wake cycles, and Pi uses its tracked primary watcher extension. All three have verified turn-end guard paths when launched with their documented setup. Pick whichever one matches your subscription and workflow.

Oh My Pi (omp), a Pi fork, is verified as a primary with the same extension-owned watcher model as Pi and a stronger turn-end guard: its blocking session_stop hook compels a continuation instead of requesting one. Codex and OpenCode are also verified and supported as primary harnesses; Codex uses bounded foreground checkpoints, and OpenCode uses a TUI plugin, so both carry more harness-specific supervision tradeoffs than the three co-primaries. Cursor Agent CLI is verified as a primary too, using a tracked project-scope .cursor/hooks.json whose stop hook parks on the watcher between turns, closest in shape to Claude Code's. Launch it with --trust, or none of its project hooks load; it also has no turn-end hook in headless cursor-agent -p, so run the primary session interactively.

Install and launch

gh auth login
git clone https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate
cd firstmate

Then launch one of the co-primary harnesses; AGENTS.md takes over from there:

Claude Code

claude

Grok

grok --trust

Pi

pi
# or, when the signed wrapper is installed
FM_PI_HARNESS=pi-signed pi-signed

Oh My Pi

omp
# or, when starting from inside a Claude Code pane
FM_OMP_HARNESS=omp omp

Start omp with this checkout as its working directory: it auto-discovers the tracked .omp/extensions/*.ts files with no trust dialog, and naming them with -e as well would load each twice.

For Grok, --trust is needed once per clone so project hooks and the turn-end guard load; /hooks-trust inside Grok works too. For Pi, approve the project trust prompt once per clone on first launch so the tracked .pi/extensions/*.ts files auto-load. The /calm toggle on Pi, and on Claude Code behind its default-off early-access function-hooks flag, hides supported transcript chrome, including canonically classified Firstmate operational user rows, and uses a Calm-only animated working boat during active runs while preserving all model context and session data. Calm changes only presentation, not the user-role delivery, ordering, authority, persistence, or exports of the operational inputs it hides. The preference persists for the effective Firstmate home, and toggling it off restores ordinary rendering. Calm's current behavior and supported limits are separate from its version-scoped maintainer evidence. Pi's /supervision-model command pins a cheaper model and a shallower reasoning effort for the supervision branch alone, from the eligible models and thinking levels Pi itself reports, and with no pin the branch normally follows your own conversation's model and effort; see the configuration schema.

Talk to it

> ahoy! look at my github project xyz, then fix the flaky login test and add dark mode

# firstmate checks its toolchain (asking your consent before installing anything),
# clones the project under projects/ and spawns two isolated workers in the active backend.
# Minutes later:

  PR ready for review, captain: https://github.com/you/xyz/pull/42
  (fix flaky login test - risk: low - CI green)

> alright merge it

More backends

Setup guides for tmux (the default) and every other supported backend (herdr, zellij, Orca, cmux) are linked in Documentation below.

How It Works

            you (the captain)
                  │  chat: requests, decisions, "merge it"
                  ▼
 ┌─────────────────────────────────────┐
 │ firstmate            (this repo)    │
 │ reads projects/ + firstmate routes  │
 │ writes guarded backlog/briefs/state │
 └──┬──────────────┬───────────────┬───┘
    │ backend sends / status files │
    ▼              ▼               ▼
 ┌────────┐   ┌────────┐      ┌────────┐
 │fm-task1│   │fm-task2│  ... │fm-taskN│   tmux windows, herdr/zellij tabs, cmux workspaces, or Orca terminals
 │crewmate│   │crewmate│      │crewmate│   one autonomous agent each
 └───┬────┘   └───┬────┘      └───┬────┘
     ▼            ▼               ▼
  treehouse worktree, Orca worktree, or isolated secondmate home
     │
     ├─ ship: project mode ► PR/local merge ► teardown
     │
     └─ scout: report at data/<id>/report.md ► decision inventory ► relay findings ► teardown

You chat with the first mate. It routes each request to a crewmate in its own session endpoint and git worktree, supervises the fleet with a zero-token event-driven watcher, and brings you finished PRs, approved local merges, or investigation reports. Optional secondmates extend this to persistent local or whole-home remote second mates, dispatch profiles let you steer which harness handles which task, and opt-in Relay lets the same fleet answer public mentions. codex-app is not a runtime backend yet; docs/codex-app-backend.md owns the Codex App boundary.

Full architecture - the supervision engine, worktree isolation, secondmates, dispatch profiles, project modes, optional Relay, fleet sync, and self-update - is in docs/architecture.md.

Built-in skills

Firstmate ships these user-invocable built-in skills. Claude and grok use the slash form shown here; codex uses the same names with $, such as $afk.

| Skill | What it does |