Sources & method

What this guide was built from, how the material was checked, and what it does not cover.

Primary sources#

Repositories. All were cloned on 2026-09-26 and read directly.

• kunchenguid/firstmate at 72b63eee: README, VISION, AGENTS (645 lines), CONTRIBUTING, GROK_BOT, every docs/*.md that matters here, every .agents/skills/*/SKILL.md, and the headers of the key bin/ scripts.
• The AXI stack: axi, gh-axi, chrome-devtools-axi, tasks-axi, quota-axi, lavish-axi, no-mistakes, treehouse.
• Neighbours: gnhf, backpass, kun, dotfiles, and the axi.md site.

Kun's writing on X.

• 173 posts by @kunchenguid from 2026-03-17 to 2026-09-25 that match firstmate, AXI, crew, no-mistakes, treehouse, herdr or gnhf.
• These were gathered by searching his posts for firstmate, first mate, myfirstmate, axi, crewmate, herdr, no-mistakes and treehouse (top and latest tabs), plus his recent timeline.
• 17 full threads were fetched, to capture his own continuation replies.

Kun's blog (Kun's Field Notes). None of the 11 posts is about firstmate directly. The relevant ones:

• Your AGENTS.md is a Neural Net
• I distilled myself
• Kun's Pi Agent Config
• The Month After Leaving Big Tech
• Everyone Should Have an OPINIONS.md

The one X Article about firstmate that search found is not by Kun. It is "Connecting an RGB lamp to the FirstMate Agent" by community member @jayparkcanada. It is summarised on Relay, voice & extras and labelled as community work.

How it was checked#

• Quotes are verbatim. Each quote was matched against the raw post text. Ellipses mark cuts. One paraphrase the research pass had put in quotation marks was caught and rewritten as prose.
• Code samples come from the repo. JSON and config samples were copied from shipped examples (docs/examples/crew-dispatch.json, docs/fleet-ledger.md). Two early sketches that didn't match the real schema were replaced.
• Script behaviour is described from each script's header comment, which firstmate treats as the canonical spec. A claim that firstmate uses treehouse leases for task worktrees turned out wrong on inspection (fm-spawn.sh runs treehouse get) and was corrected.
• Chat exchanges on Your first voyage are illustrative. The repo ships no real transcripts. Only the README's short example is verbatim.

What this guide does not cover#

• Maintainer internals: the verification docs (docs/verification/), backend CI lanes, the Codex App backend boundary, the Gerrit forge design notes, and the extension-binding protocol beyond the example.
• Every env var. docs/configuration.md has about 180 lines of them. Only the ones worth tuning are here.
• Anything after 2026-09-26. firstmate lands several PRs a day.

Staying current#

1. /updatefirstmate pulls the latest distro.
2. Ask your first mate: "what changed in AGENTS.md since ?" It can diff itself.
3. Follow @kunchenguid or join the Discord.
4. npx skills add kunchenguid/kun -g, then /kun <question> for his current opinion.