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/secondmate-provisioning/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/secondmate-provisioning)<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/secondmate-provisioning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/secondmate-provisioning/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/secondmate-provisioning"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/kunchenguid/firstmate/secondmate-provisioning.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 | $0.00045 | $0.06607 |
| Opus 5.5 | $0.00018 | $0.02643 |
| Sonnet 5.5 | $0.00009 | $0.01321 |
| Haiku 4.5 | $0.00005 | $0.00661 |
Grade A, and why
secondmate-provisioning 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 today.
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 — 266 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.
secondmate-provisioning
Use this reference before creating, seeding, validating, launching, handing backlog to, recovering, pushing inherited local material into, or retiring a persistent secondmate, and before editing data/secondmates.md.
Keep the always-inline routing rules in AGENTS.md authoritative: route by natural-language scope:, local-only projects stay with the main firstmate, and secondmates are idle by default.
Routing table
data/secondmates.md has one parser-compatible line per persistent second mate.
A local route uses:
- <id> - <one-sentence charter summary> (home: <absolute-home-path>; scope: <natural-language responsibility>; projects: <project-a>, <project-b>; added <date>)
A whole-home remote route uses:
- <id> - <one-sentence charter summary> (host: <ssh-alias>; root: <absolute-remote-code-root>; home: <absolute-remote-home>; scope: <natural-language responsibility>; projects: <project-a>, <project-b>; added <date>)
Each registry entry stays concise and single-line: the summary is one sentence naming the durable charter, scope: is the natural-language intake responsibility, projects: is the non-exclusive clone list, and any extra prose is limited to genuinely domain-specific hard rules that change routing or safety for that secondmate.
Natural-language summary and scope: text may contain parentheses and semicolons; keep the generated (home: ...; scope: ...; projects: ...; added ...) suffix intact so operational consumers resolve its explicit field markers.
The home: path points to the seeded home containing data/charter.md; no extra registry pointer field is needed.
For a remote route, host: is an OpenSSH config alias and root: is that host's separate tracked Firstmate code root.
A remote second-mate agent always runs on the Herdr backend and every seed, launch, and liveness relaunch first gates its host on bin/fm-remote-doctor.sh readiness, so an unready host refuses with that doctor's own gap text rather than half-creating a route; the workers that second mate supervises keep the home's ordinary backend selection.
This release places whole secondmate homes remotely and never individual workers.
docs/remote-secondmates.md owns current operator setup and transport behavior.
The home-seeded data/charter.md is the sole owner of boilerplate idle-by-default behavior, the normal delegation lifecycle, and standard escalation contracts, so point to that charter rather than restating those contracts in the registry entry.
The scope: field is used during intake.
The projects: field is a non-exclusive clone list, not ownership.
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.
- today Changed · +2 lines 46180d9ca5bb
- yesterday Changed bcd2b9cf7a35
- 3d ago Changed · -9 lines 18342a03192c
- 4d ago Changed · -2 lines · -58 tokens per session c678c1225eff
- 6d ago Changed · +2 lines ce5f1b0b95b9
- 7d ago Changed · +2 lines ccf7c0023420
- 11d ago Changed · +1 lines 88ad2fba313f
- 12d ago Changed 7d428459ac6a
- 24d ago Changed · +2 lines 155bad335beb
- 28d ago First seen · 268 lines · 103 tokens per session scan A 114e4786fb30
secondmate-provisioning is a skill published in the GitHub repository kunchenguid/firstmate (8,295 stars, last pushed today), licensed MIT. It adds 45 tokens to every session and 6,607 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.
Other skills, from other repositories
local-ai-agents
Build local-first AI agents that run entirely on a developer workstation with Microsoft Foundry Local and Qwen function-calling models. Covers Small Language Models (SLMs), the OpenAI-compatible local endpoint, sandboxed local tools, local RAG with Chroma, local MCP servers, hybrid cloud/local routing, and the…
systematic-debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes.
next-cache-components-adoption
Turn on Cache Components in a Next.js app and resolve the blocking routes it surfaces. Use when the user wants to enable, adopt, or migrate to Cache Components, flip the cacheComponents flag, work through a flood of blocking-prerender / instant validation errors, run the cache-components-instant-false codemod, or…
chronicle
Analyze Copilot session history for standup reports, usage tips, session search, and session reindexing. Use when the user asks for a standup, daily summary, usage tips, workflow recommendations, wants to search or find past sessions by keyword/file/PR, wants to reindex their session store, or asks about deleting…
chat-pet-sprite-creation
Use when creating or changing VS Code chat pet sprite art, sprite sheets, state animations, eye treatments, Stable/Insiders variants, or pet transitions under src/vs/workbench/contrib/chat/browser/widget/media/chatPet.
component-fixtures
Use when creating or updating component fixtures for screenshot testing or their shared infrastructure, or when designing UI components to be fixture-friendly. Covers fixture file structure, theming, service setup, CSS scoping, async rendering, validation, and common pitfalls.