#7171st of 169 in Coding agents and AI editors
firstmate
Agent distro that lets one chat agent dispatch parallel coding agents in git worktrees
- Stars
- 8.3k
- License
- MIT
- Last commit
- Oct 2026
- Language
- Shell
1 on 12 Jun 20268,276 on 23 Oct 2026
From GitHub's daily star counts.
Checked on GitHub.
Overview
firstmate is a cloned repo of AGENTS.md instructions, bundled skills and shell helper scripts. Launched inside a terminal coding agent such as Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Codex or Cursor Agent CLI, it becomes a single "first mate" you talk to. It spawns crewmate agents in tmux, Herdr, Zellij, cmux or Orca sessions, gives each a clean git worktree, supervises them with a bash watcher, and returns PRs, local merges or investigation reports.
Who it is for: Developers running several coding agents in parallel from the terminal
Strengths
- Each task runs in its own treehouse or Orca worktree, so parallel work on one repo does not collide
- Crewmates are visible tmux windows or Herdr tabs you can watch or type into
- State is kept on disk, so a restarted session reconciles the fleet
- Per-project modes: no-mistakes, direct-PR or local-only, with optional +yolo merge autonomy
Weaknesses
- Needs a separate primary harness (Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Codex, etc.); it is not standalone
- Zellij, cmux and Orca backends are marked experimental
- Supervision and turn-end guard behavior differs across harnesses; Codex and OpenCode carry more tradeoffs
- Supports macOS and Linux only; GitHub CLI authentication is required
What it needs
- no GPU
- Needs git, GitHub CLI (gh), tmux (default backend), treehouse, a supported agent harness (Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor Agent CLI)
- Models: Claude Code, Grok, Pi, Oh My Pi, Codex
Quick answers
Is firstmate open source?
Yes. Its code is on GitHub under the MIT license.
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