firstmate

kunchenguid · Autonomous & Async Agents · Updated Sep 16, 2026

firstmate is an "agent distro": a portable directory of AGENTS.md instructions, bundled skills, helper scripts, policies, and state conventions that turns any terminal coding agent into a first mate that commands a crew. You talk only to the first mate; it clones your projects, spawns autonomous crewmates in a visible session backend (tmux by default, or herdr, zellij, cmux, and Orca), gives each one a disposable git worktree, supervises them with an event-driven bash watcher that wakes the primary session only when a decision is needed, and hands back finished pull requests, approved local merges, or standalone scout reports. Projects declare a mode (`no-mistakes`, `direct-PR`, `local-only`, optional `+yolo`), the first mate is read-only over your repos outside guarded operations, all state lives on disk so sessions are restart-proof, and larger fleets can opt into persistent secondmates running from isolated homes locally or over SSH.

Recent Updates

~6.1k GitHub stars and 650+ commits as of September 2026; trending on GitHub (weekly) in mid-September 2026 with Cursor Agent CLI, Grok, and Oh My Pi added as verified primary harnesses and a documentation restructure.

As of Sep 16, 2026

Key Features

Single liaison agent that dispatches, supervises, and escalates only real decisions
One clean git worktree per crewmate so parallel work on a repo never collides
Zero-token watcher plus turn-end backstops for Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Codex, OpenCode, and Cursor Agent CLI
Ship tasks (PRs or local merges) and scout tasks (investigation reports) with explicit project modes
Restart-proof on-disk state with tmux, herdr, zellij, cmux, or Orca backends
Optional secondmates and X/Discord Relay for remote fleets

Who It's For

✓ Best For

Developers who already run a terminal coding agent and want to fan work out to several autonomous agents without babysitting tabs or copy-pasting context between repos.

✗ Not Ideal For

Users who want a packaged GUI or hosted service rather than a repo-as-product; teams needing centralized governance or audit trails. For a desktop take on parallel agents see Atlas, Orkas, or LoopTroop; for worktree-only tooling see workmux or Worktrunk.

Pricing

Open Source

Free and open-source under MIT; the cloned repo is the product. You pay only for the agent harness (Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Pi, Grok, or Cursor Agent CLI) and models you already use. The optional myfirstmate.io Relay for X/Discord mentions is a separate hosted service.

Verdict

A thoughtfully engineered, harness-agnostic way to run a crew of coding agents from one conversation; the distro model is unusual but keeps everything inspectable and portable.

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