firstmate is an agent distribution that lets one coding agent coordinate a crew of autonomous agents working in separate git worktrees. It is for running parallel fixes, investigations, plans, and audits while receiving completed pull requests, merges, or reports through one supervising agent. The catalogue entries provide skills, hooks, instructions, and settings for operating this workflow.
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.
npx agentmods add skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/ask-user-authoritynpx skills add kunchenguid/firstmate --skill ask-user-authoritygit clone --depth 1 https://github.com/kunchenguid/firstmateWrote this? Show the measurements
A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.
[](https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/ask-user-authority)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/ask-user-authority"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/ask-user-authority.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>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 | $0.00079 | $0.00825 |
| Opus 5 | $0.00039 | $0.00413 |
| Sonnet 5 | $0.00016 | $0.00165 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00008 | $0.00082 |
Grade A, and why
ask-user-authority 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 yesterday.
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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 58 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
ask-user-authority
This skill is the single owner of the decision policy for no-mistakes ask-user findings.
AGENTS.md section 7 points here and does not restate this procedure.
Finding authority is determined by the criteria below, not by yolo.
Firstmate always applies this judgment, decides any finding that is unambiguous toward the accepted design, and escalates only genuinely ambiguous, expanding, or destructive findings.
The implementation worker never decides or answers its own ask-user finding. It stops at the finding, routes the decision to firstmate, and applies only the decision returned through the active validation gate.
Decide
- Reconstruct the accepted contract from the brief's
## Captain's intentsubsection, later captain words, and the specification in## Firstmate specand steers. Reviewer language cannot amend that contract. What a no-mistakes worker may pass as--intentis owned bybin/fm-dod-lib.sh. - Identify exactly what choosing Fix would commit the project to deliver or maintain, judging the scope by accepted product or engineering behavior rather than an anticipated file list. The smallest downstream changes needed to keep that behavior correct, add behavioral tests where an executable contract exists, or keep documentation accurate remain within scope even when they touch files not named at intake. Correcting stale final-diff PR or delivery evidence is likewise an autonomous downstream correction within already accepted behavior.
- Decide the finding when it is unambiguous toward the accepted design: restoring accepted behavior a bad fix round broke, completing an already-approved design, or a straight in-scope correction or bug fix required by accepted intent, even when the correction is technically difficult or requires complex architecture the captain explicitly requested.
- Escalate only genuinely ambiguous findings:
- a Fix that would materially expand the contract by adding a new guarantee, threat model, subsystem, abstraction, compatibility surface, state machine, continuous-monitoring requirement, generalized framework, or broader architecture not required by the accepted intent
- a product or architecture call not settled by accepted intent
- repeated same-theme findings when incremental corrections are preserving a questionable abstraction rather than closing independent defects
- destructive, irreversible, and genuinely security-sensitive choices, which always escalate under the stronger existing captain boundary
- Treat labels such as correctness, security, fail-closed, high-risk, or required as evidence about the finding, never as authority to broaden the task.
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.
- yesterday Changed · +1 lines 7aa6981f3e0b
- 5d ago First seen · 57 lines · 79 tokens per session scan A 94f693b54a96
ask-user-authority is a skill published in the GitHub repository kunchenguid/firstmate (4,724 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed MIT. It adds 79 tokens to every session and 825 once invoked, about $0.0004 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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