AI product Open source
firstmate is an agent distro that turns a terminal coding agent into a supervisor for a crew of autonomous coding agents. It provides instructions, skills, tooling, policies, and state conventions rather than a separately installed application: cloning the repository and launching a supported harness creates the primary “first mate” session.
The first mate dispatches requests to visible agent sessions running in tmux, Herdr, Zellij, cmux, or Orca backends. Each crewmate receives an isolated Git worktree and performs either a ship task, which produces an authorized change for a pull request or local merge, or a scout task, which produces a standalone investigation report. An event-driven watcher supervises the sessions without continuously consuming model tokens, reconciles state after restarts, and reports results or escalates decisions to the user. Optional persistent second mates can run from isolated firstmate homes locally or on SSH-reachable hosts, and optional Relay support handles eligible mentions on X and Discord through the same task lifecycle.
The repository supports primary harnesses including Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Oh My Pi, Codex, OpenCode, and Cursor Agent CLI, and requires Git and an authenticated GitHub CLI for the documented workflow. It is distributed under the MIT license.
1 use taken from transcripts — each links to the moment in the video.
An agent dispatcher that turns a terminal coding agent into a supervisor for a crew of autonomous agents. It creates isolated Git worktrees, monitors agents, and returns completed pull requests, merges, or reports.
1 in the library.