firstmate is a supervising-agent tool that lets you talk to a single agent (the first mate) which spawns, isolates, and supervises a crew of autonomous coding agents in one repo. It returns finished PRs, local merges, or standalone reports instead of requiring you to juggle parallel sessions yourself.
Project overview
By running each task in a disposable git worktree and escalating only real decisions to you, firstmate directly addresses the manual coordination burden of running multiple parallel coding agents on a single repository.
Project type
AI Agent
Use cases
Coding & Development
Deployment
Refer to project documentation
License
MIT
Best for
Developers who run multiple parallel coding-agent tasks on one repository and want a single supervising agent to manage them.
Users who already have a supported agent harness installed and authenticated, such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor Agent CLI.
Key capabilities
The first mate agent dispatches tasks to spawned crewmate agents, supervises them, escalates only real decisions, and reports outcomes.
Each task runs in a clean treehouse git worktree so parallel work on one repo never collides.
Limitations and risks
A verified primary agent harness such as Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Codex, OpenCode, or Cursor Agent CLI must be installed and authenticated before firstmate can run; these are third-party tools, not part of firstmate.
Git and the GitHub CLI, authenticated through `gh auth login`, are required dependencies.
The project's documentation does not establish an end-to-end data boundary; note that the required harnesses may involve remote model services.
Getting started
Setup requires installing and authenticating an external agent harness plus the gh CLI. Run `gh auth login`, clone the repo (`git clone https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate`), enter the directory (`cd firstmate`), and launch with `claude`.
Evidence and sources
README: 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…
README: 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 g…
README: - **One liaison** - you talk only to the first mate; it dispatches, supervises, escalates only real decisions, and reports plain outcomes.
README: - **Disposable worktrees** - each task runs in a clean [treehouse](https://github.com/kunchenguid/treehouse) git worktree, or an Orca-managed worktree when `backend=orca`, so para…
README: > ahoy! look at my github project xyz, then fix the flaky login test and add dark mode