firstmate: Skill for Claude Code

Session-start recovery

The digest itself makes no external-network call and never waits for one. Every network check a session start owes - GitHub auth, secondmate recovery, secondmate convergence, pending handoff delivery, and project clone refresh - runs off the digest's blocking path in a bounded worker owned by bin/fm-startup-network.sh and is reported in the digest's own NETWORK CHECKS section. The locked startup inactive-outcome scan joins that worker so a slow local current-state read cannot block the digest; its findings use the ordinary durable wake queue.

1. Lock - acquires the per-home session lock first, before anything mutates shared state, then starts the deferred startup stage above.
2. Bootstrap - detect-only checks (tool/version problems, the worktree-tangle check, harness override, dispatch-profile validation, backlog-backend status) always run, but routine confirmations stay silent by default. When the lock could not be acquired, the worktree-tangle check uses read-only advisory wording without a checkout repair command. Home-local stale Herdr projection cleanup and the six bootstrap MUTATING sweeps - same-home backlog reconciliation, fleet sync, secondmate convergence, secondmate liveness, pending remote handoff retry, and Relay artifact writes - run only when this session actually holds the lock from step 1; the four network ones among them run in the deferred stage rather than in this section. The secondmate liveness sweep accounts for every registered secondmate and reports skipped or failed recovery as SECONDMATE_LIVENESS: lines. The sweep and the watcher's cadence-gated tick share the recovery contract; for T3 threads, follow the native recovery guide.
3. Wake queue - when locked, drains and presents the durable wake queue without running the inactive-outcome scan inline, and prints the raw records prominently as this turn's first work queue; a clearly labeled status-event annotation may follow a valid signal record and includes every status line still unread at the presentation cursor, but never replaces the raw record or current-state reconciliation, and a lapsed watcher chain still surfaces here via the same guard alarm. Presented records remain durable until the handling turn runs the generation-bound acknowledgement printed by the drain. Every locked drain also prints a bounded fleet-wide OPEN DECISIONS section when durable decision records remain open, including when the queue itself is empty; reconcile those entries before continuing. A main drain may also print a bounded, one-shot STATUS OUTCOME BACKSTOP when a task's newest captain-facing status event has no covering supervision-branch outcome; handle it as a recovered wake even when no queue row remains. The same drain prints every still-unread note: line and pending-reply resolution since the last presentation in an unbounded UNREAD STATUS section, so an answer buried under a later routine line is not dropped; those lines are not re-printed after that presentation. It also prints a bounded RECORD DIVERGENCE section naming every captain call the status log reads as resolved while its backlog task is still held; nothing is closed for you, and captain-hold-lifecycle owns the reconciliation. When the lock could not be acquired and verified, the queue is left untouched because no session mutation is authorized, and the guard's tangle/watcher-liveness alarms still print in read-only advisory mode without drain, supervision repair, or checkout repair commands.
4. Supervision operating instructions - after the wake queue and before both digests, the digest emits exactly one operating block for the detected primary harness, followed by the read-once contract that governs them. The script itself never starts supervision; the emitted harness protocol owns the exact wait or wake mechanism.
5. Fleet-state digest - after that read-once contract and ahead of the context digest, the compact backlog listing owned by bin/fm-session-start.sh; every state/<id>.meta; a bounded tail of each task's state/<id>.status (labeled as wake-EVENT history, not current state, with the full log path printed for a deeper read); the away or quiet posture (state/.afk-contract, plus the state/.afk daemon flag where a daemon runs); and one cheap alive/dead read of each task's recorded backend endpoint. That liveness line is a fast presence check only, not a full state read - when you need a crew's actual current state (a run-step, not just "is the pane there"), read it with bin/fm-crew-state.sh <id> as before; the digest deliberately skips that deeper, slower read for every task so it stays fast and bounded.
6. Network checks - after the fleet-state digest, the deferred stage's result, or an explicit statement of what it has not confirmed yet. A read-only session runs no network checks at all and says so.
7. Context digest and next step - last of the bulk sections, the full contents of data/projects.md, data/secondmates.md, data/captain.md, data/captain-shared.md, and data/learnings.md, each clearly delimited, followed by the closing reminder. A file that does not exist prints an explicit ABSENT marker, never confused with an empty-but-present file: absence is meaningful (captain.md absent means use the firstmate repo's built-in defaults, projects.md absent means rebuild it from the clones under projects/, etc.). The closing reminder points back to the emitted supervision block and preserves only the lock, afk, Relay, and read-once reminders.