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/firstmate-orca/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/firstmate-orca)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/firstmate-orca"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/firstmate-orca/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/firstmate-orca"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/firstmate-orca.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 | $0.00043 | $0.01235 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00017 | $0.00494 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.00247 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00004 | $0.00123 |
Grade A, and why
firstmate-orca 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 — 94 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
firstmate-orca
Use this as the operator checklist for Firstmate's experimental Orca runtime backend.
It does not replace AGENTS.md, docs/orca-backend.md, or harness-adapters.
Orca is a runtime backend, not an agent harness.
The runtime backend owns the task endpoint and, for Orca, the task worktree.
The harness is the agent process launched inside that endpoint, such as claude, codex, opencode, pi, pi-signed, grok, or kimi.
Load harness-adapters for harness-specific launch, interrupt, resume, trust-dialog, and skill-invocation facts.
Implementation details, metadata fields, teardown guarantees, and limitations live in docs/orca-backend.md.
docs/verification/runtime-backends.md "Orca" owns active smoke evidence.
Prefer the bin/fm-* helpers over raw orca commands.
Use raw orca only when the helper surface cannot answer the inspection question, and keep the recorded firstmate metadata as the task identity.
Preflight
Work from the current firstmate home or repo root.
If FM_HOME is set, remember that operational state lives under $FM_HOME while the helper scripts still run from this repo's bin/.
Before switching or spawning against Orca:
- Confirm Orca is intentionally selected through
--backend orca,FM_BACKEND=orca, or localconfig/backend. - Confirm the Orca app is running and the backend readiness checks pass before expecting spawn to work.
- Inspect active
state/*.metarecords before changing backend selection. - Treat a backend switch as affecting future spawns only; existing tasks keep their recorded backend.
- Reconcile watcher wakes before unrelated work, especially if Orca tasks are already in flight.
Spawn
Use bin/fm-spawn.sh so firstmate creates the brief, worktree, terminal, metadata, status file, and watcher surface together.
Pass --backend orca for a one-off Orca task, or rely on the already-selected Orca backend when that selection is intentional.
After spawn, check the task with firstmate helpers:
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 · -13 tokens per session 61a855adf20a
- 1mo ago First seen · 93 lines · 56 tokens per session scan A 7755df04d88c
firstmate-orca is a skill published in the GitHub repository kunchenguid/firstmate (8,295 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 1,235 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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