firstmate is an agent distribution system that orchestrates multiple coding agents to work in parallel on different tasks.
The tool addresses the friction of managing multiple concurrent agent sessions by introducing a hierarchical model where you interact with a single "first mate" agent that coordinates a crew of subordinate agents. Rather than juggling multiple tabs and manually passing context between repositories, firstmate spawns autonomous agents with isolated git worktrees, supervises their execution, and consolidates their outputs into finished pull requests, approved merges, or reports. The system treats agents as portable distributions—directories containing instructions, skills, tooling, and state conventions that specialize a general-purpose agent for specific work patterns.
firstmate suits teams running multiple parallel coding tasks who want to avoid context-switching overhead and manual coordination between agent sessions. It works best for projects where you need simultaneous fixes, investigations, planning, and audits without managing separate agent instances. The tool supports persistent secondmates that can run on remote SSH-accessible hosts, enabling distributed agent crews across machines. It is explicitly not a model, harness, skill library, MCP server, or CLI—it is a distribution format that any terminal-capable coding agent can execute.
The project maintains active community engagement through Discord and social channels. Development shows responsiveness to user feedback with visible iteration on the core agent coordination model. The codebase is written primarily in shell, keeping the distribution lightweight and portable across macOS and Linux environments without requiring installation—the cloned repository itself serves as the complete distribution.
