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.
Borrowing it
Nothing to install: this file belongs to kunchenguid/firstmate. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.
curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kunchenguid/firstmate/main/.agents/skills/captain-hold-lifecycle/SKILL.mdgit 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/captain-hold-lifecycle)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/captain-hold-lifecycle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/captain-hold-lifecycle/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/captain-hold-lifecycle"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/captain-hold-lifecycle.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>- NVIDIA SkillSpector pass
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 5.1 | $0.00060 | $0.01983 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00024 | $0.00793 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00012 | $0.00397 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00006 | $0.00198 |
Grade A, and why
captain-hold-lifecycle 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 4d 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.
How it starts
The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 70 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
Captain-hold lifecycle
A decision is not a separate thing: it is simply a task waiting on the captain.
The one primitive is an ordinary backlog task held for the captain through bin/fm-captain-hold.sh hold; its identity is the task id, and that wrapper owns the deterministic mechanics this policy relies on.
The agent performs the semantic inventory because scripts must not infer captain calls from report prose, visual-review artifacts, terminal output, or chat.
Policy
Every unresolved question that belongs to the captain and is discovered while producing, reading, presenting, or ending an investigation or visual review must be carried by a captain-held task in the authoritative backlog of the home that owns the originating work before that work or review may be treated as complete.
For a Lavish board-backed handoff, pass the reply through bin/fm-procevent-lavish.sh arm --agent-reply-file before appending the status; the adapter owns version-specific acceptance ordering.
Prefer holding the work item the question gates over minting a new row; create a new task only when no work item exists to hold.
The originating investigation or review is never its own inventory entry, so hold a separate task for the call and pass --origin <origin-id> so complete can check it.
Put the question and its options in the hold reason, and keep one held task per genuine gate: a multi-question review is one held task pointing at its report, not a row per question. Represent that task with exactly one board card that consolidates its questions and options; never fan one task id into duplicate same-key cards.
Register or re-hold through bin/fm-captain-hold.sh hold, which is idempotent per task id.
After inventorying the whole report and review surface, run bin/fm-captain-hold.sh complete with every captain-held task id, or with --none only when the reviewed surface leaves nothing waiting on the captain.
A completed investigation and an ended visual review use this same owner and completion command; a visual tool, including Lavish, never owns a parallel completion policy.
Run the command in the originating work's authoritative FM_HOME; secondmate-owned work registers in that secondmate home's backlog, and a question already held anywhere is never re-registered as a second row.
Do not close a captain-held task merely because the originating investigation completed, its report was archived, its visual review ended, or its task was torn down.
Holding the work item the question gates is safe for exactly that reason: cleanup keeps such a row open with the finished work's deliverable recorded and returns it to the queue, so it still reads as the captain's own call.
Only answer with the captain's words or an evidence-backed reconcile close may resolve it.
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.
- 4d ago Changed · -1 lines · -27 tokens per session e585eae7d56e
- 23d ago Changed · +1 lines 5e489c53a1a5
- 24d ago Changed · +1 lines 4feb821103e6
- 27d ago Changed 5b103fa44d5b
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines 331723da731b
- 1mo ago Changed · +10 lines 0e0e5486d589
- 1mo ago Changed fcc74b18c60c
- 1mo ago Changed · +2 lines a50a84264ead
- 1mo ago First seen · 55 lines · 87 tokens per session scan A 25086c2783b1
captain-hold-lifecycle is a skill published in the GitHub repository kunchenguid/firstmate (8,295 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 60 tokens to every session and 1,983 once invoked, about $0.0002 per session on Opus 5.5. 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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