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firstmate — "talk to one agent, ship with a crew"

What it is: A liaison agent. Instead of juggling many agent sessions yourself, you talk to one agent (the first mate) that dispatches and supervises a crew of worker agents. It's the capstone of the workflow — all the other tools wired into one. Free & OSS, and new.

What it does for you

  • Decomposes a request into parallel tasks (e.g. "add an update command to all 3 CLIs" → 3 tasks).
  • Spins up each in its own tmux window with a clean treehouse worktree.
  • Runs a worker agent per task, then runs no-mistakes to validate → PR.
  • Two task types: ship (produces PRs / local merges) and scout (investigation reports). The first mate stays read-only on your projects except safe ops + approved merges.
  • You just keep giving it work and asking questions; it does the context-switching.

Install

./setup.sh firstmate
  • Clones the repo to ~/.local/share/firstmate (kept up to date on re-run).
  • Adds a firstmate shell launcher (via ~/.config/agentic-dev-setup.zsh) that runs your agent harness inside that clone — which is how firstmate is meant to run.

Daily use

firstmate                      # launches Claude Code inside the firstmate repo
FIRSTMATE_AGENT=codex firstmate  # or use a different harness

Then just talk to it:

  • "Work on lavish-axi, gh-axi, and chrome-devtools-axi — add an update command to each CLI that bumps to the latest npm version." → it runs 3 parallel ship tasks.
  • "Look at the 3 most recent open issues in lavish-axi and tell me which are actionable." → a scout task, while the ship tasks run in the background.

On first run it does setup and asks preferences, including the per-project delivery mode: full gates to PR (uses no-mistakes), direct-PR, or local-only.

Gotchas

  • Run it inside tmux — each crewmate appears in its own tmux window; that's the intended experience.
  • It depends on the rest of the stack (tmux, git, gh, treehouse, no-mistakes). On first launch it detects missing deps and asks consent before installing.
  • Because firstmate removes so much overhead, the bottleneck shifts to you — knowing what to build. That's the "captain's mindset" the video ends on.