kunchenguid/firstmate

Talk to one agent. Ship with a crew.

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 instantiates your first mate - and makes you the captain.

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