An away-mode supervisor for a coding-agent session. It records that the main operator is away and lets a background supervisor handle routine events while sending important issues back.

It helps start and track the away-mode state, run the sub-supervisor daemon, and batch escalations for later review.

It prevents routine background activity from repeatedly interrupting the person supervising the agent.

afk — Skill by kunchenguid

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods

npx agentmods add skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/afk

Any agent

npx skills add kunchenguid/firstmate --skill afk

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmate

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 117 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 4,724 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5	$0.00117	$0.04724
Opus 5	$0.00059	$0.02362
Sonnet 5	$0.00023	$0.00945
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00472

Measured 3d ago against content hash 9b71abda2d03, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

afk scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

.agents/skills/afk/SKILL.md · 242 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 242 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

afk

Away-mode supervision. When invoked, /afk makes the daemon's token-saving tradeoff consented and explicit: the captain is stepping away, so the sub-supervisor may triage routine wakes in bash instead of waking firstmate's LLM for each one. Escalations still reach the captain, but as one pre-read, batched digest rather than per-wake injections.

What it does

Enter the lifecycle through bin/fm-afk-launch.sh. This owns the durable state write, session-scoped stale-artifact clearing, terminal record, and rollback. The flag survives a firstmate restart, so recovery re-enters afk when it is present.
Ensure the sub-supervisor daemon is running as a tracked background process. Its hosting differs by harness. Pick the right path:
- Harness WITH a native in-pane tracked-background tool (e.g. claude's background bash, grok's background tool): first run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start-native, then run FM_AFK_STATE_PREPARED=1 bin/fm-afk-start.sh through that native tool. This is a deliberate no-separate-terminal exception because the harness-hosted job creates no terminal or layout mutation, and a shell launcher cannot invoke a harness-native background tool. The launcher still owns lifecycle state and records the no-terminal mode, while the daemon inherits and auto-discovers the captain pane. If the native launch fails, run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh stop to roll back the prepared lifecycle. Do not wrap it in nohup ... & (Codex/herdr can reap fire-and-forget shell children after a tool call returns).
- Harness WITHOUT one (e.g. pi): run bin/fm-afk-launch.sh start. It is the single owner of the daemon terminal: it creates a NON-VISIBLE tracked terminal for the current backend (a herdr dedicated --no-focus workspace, a detached tmux session), records its exact id, and passes the captain pane in as FM_SUPERVISOR_TARGET so the daemon injects into the captain, not its own new pane. Never manufacture a terminal by splitting the captain's active pane (herdr pane split): a split co-tenants the tab and visibly shrinks the captain's pane (docs/herdr-backend.md "Away-mode supervisor support"). Both paths share bin/fm-afk-start.sh as the daemon entry. The native path tells it that the launcher already prepared lifecycle state; the terminal-backed path lets the entry perform its existing state setup inside the new terminal. It exits immediately if the identity-backed daemon lock already names a live process, otherwise it execs bin/fm-supervise-daemon.sh in the foreground. The daemon is presence-gated: it injects escalations only while state/.afk exists, and stays quiet otherwise.

Read the full file on GitHub · 242 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

3d ago First seen · 242 lines · 117 tokens per session scan A 9b71abda2d03

Subscribe to this mod's changes

afk is a skill published in the GitHub repository kunchenguid/firstmate (4,623 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 117 tokens to every session and 4,724 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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