# kunchenguid/firstmate

Talk to one agent. Ship with a crew.

Repository: https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/firstmate
Language: Shell
License: MIT
License Family: permissive
Last push: 2026-08-26T23:05:44+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 58/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 99, release rhythm 35, longevity 5
- inputs: {"age_days": 82, "days_push": 7, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: no_releases, young
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 4163, forks 1387 (observed 2026-08-28T04:08:36.467010+00:00)

## What it is
firstmate is an 'agent distro' - a portable directory of instructions, skills, and scripts that turns a terminal coding agent into a supervisor that dispatches a crew of autonomous sub-agents. You talk to one liaison agent (the first mate), which spawns parallel crew agents in isolated git worktrees, supervises them, and delivers finished PRs, merges, or investigation reports.

## Use cases
- run multiple coding agent tasks in parallel without juggling terminal tabs
- dispatch fixes, investigations, plans, and audits to autonomous sub-agents
- give each parallel task a clean isolated git worktree
- get finished PRs or local merges from delegated coding tasks
- supervise a fleet of agents across local and SSH-reachable hosts
- turn any terminal coding agent into a multi-agent crew supervisor

## When to choose
- you regularly run several coding agent tasks in parallel on one or more repos
- you want a single liaison agent handling dispatch, supervision, and escalation
- you need isolated git worktrees per task to avoid collisions
- you use tmux/zellij-based terminal coding agents on macOS or Linux

## When to avoid
- you only need a single coding agent session with no parallelism
- you want a GUI or hosted product rather than a repo-based distro of instructions and scripts
- you work primarily on Windows or outside terminal-based agent harnesses
- you need a model, harness, MCP server, or standalone CLI - firstmate explicitly is none of these

## Facets
- artifact type: framework
- maturity: active
- function: agent-framework, workflow-automation, developer-tools, cli
- domain: developer-tools
- platform: cli
- tags: multi-agent-orchestration, coding-agents, git-worktrees, agent-distro, tmux, parallel-tasks, ai-coding, ai-agents, automation, command-line, macos, linux, shell

## Member repositories
- kunchenguid/firstmate (main) score 58

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:36.467010+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-29T18:22:48.196348+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate (fetched 2026-08-28T04:08:36.467010+00:00, sha 6b9ccc34f8ad)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.