Price terms as published
Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-09-22. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.
| # | Plan / term | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free (open source, MIT) | 2026-09-22 |
One-liner: “Talk to one agent. Ship with a crew.” — firstmate flips multi-agent coding from tab-juggling to a chain of command: you chat with the first mate, it spawns crewmates in visible tmux/herdr sessions and clean git worktrees, supervises them to completion, and hands you PRs, approved merges, or investigation reports.
Verified facts (GitHub API + raw README, 2026-09-22)
| Attribute | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 6,906 (2,100 forks) | kunchenguid/firstmate via GitHub API, 2026-09-22 |
| Open issues vs PRs | API combined 1,707 — search-API same-day split: 538 issues + 1,171 PRs (sums to 1,709; ±2 is search-index lag) | GitHub API + search |
| License | MIT (README License section: “MIT - see LICENSE”) | GitHub API + README |
| Language / platforms | Shell; badge reads “macOS | Linux” — no Windows claim | GitHub API + README badge |
| Created / last push | 2026-06-12 / 2026-09-21 (daily-activity rhythm) | GitHub API |
| Self-definition | “not a model, not a harness, not a skill, not an MCP server, and not a CLI… an agent distro for running a crew of agents” | README, verbatim |
| Supported harnesses | Claude Code, Grok, Pi, pi-signed, Oh My Pi, Codex, OpenCode, Cursor Agent CLI |
README requirements |
| Session backends | tmux (hard default), herdr; zellij / cmux / Orca explicitly experimental | README |
| Worktree isolation | each task in a treehouse git worktree (same author) or Orca-managed worktree | README |
| Built-in commands | /afk /quiet /ahoy /bearings /updatefirstmate /stow (6 user-invocable skills) |
README |
What the trend clips got wrong
Roundup videos packaged this as a “24-hour overnight batch runner”. The README
makes no overnight claim anywhere — its own worked example shows the fleet
returning “Minutes later” with a PR link. The genuinely distinctive ideas are
the agent distro framing (the cloned repo is the product: AGENTS.md +
bundled skills + helper scripts, launched inside any supported harness) and
event-driven, zero-token supervision (a bash watcher sleeps on the fleet
and wakes the first mate only when something needs the captain).
The design decisions worth stealing
- Two task shapes: ship tasks deliver authorized changes; scout tasks leave standalone investigation reports — parallel work that was never going to merge doesn’t pretend to be a PR.
- Explicit project modes:
no-mistakes,direct-PR, orlocal-only, plus an optional+yolomerge-autonomy flag — autonomy is configured per project, not granted globally. - Read-only liaison: the first mate is read-only over your projects except narrow captain-approved operations; crewmates make every other change behind the configured merge authority.
- Restart-proof state: everything lives on disk and in the session backend; kill the session and the next one reconciles and carries on.
- Optional secondmates and Relay: persistent sub-crew homes on this machine or SSH-reachable hosts, and an opt-in bridge that lets the fleet answer your public X/Discord mentions.
The catches
- macOS/Linux only per its own platform badge. Windows users are out of scope until the README says otherwise.
- The 1.7k “open issues” number is mostly PRs (1,171): a fleet that self-authorizes lots of pull requests generates its own traffic. Judge the 538 real issues, not the GitHub-page headline.
- Vocabulary tax. Captain, first mate, crewmate, secondmate, treehouse, bearings, stow — the docs are coherent but you must learn the model before the workflow clicks.
- Harness trust setup is per-clone (trust prompts,
--trustfor Grok, extension approval for Pi) — expect one-time friction per machine.
Who should use it
Developers already running multiple coding-agent sessions by hand who want a single liaison and auditable autonomy levels, and agent-tooling readers — the “distro” concept (portable directory of instructions + skills + policies) is influential design thinking regardless of whether you run the fleet.
Star/fork counts, dates, and the issue-vs-PR split verified via GitHub API and search API on 2026-09-22; product behavior quoted from the current README. Firstmate was not installed or run for this page; no hands-on claims are made.