Timeline & quotes
How firstmate and the AXI stack grew from March to September 2026, told through Kun's own posts, plus the quotes most worth remembering.
Timeline#
| Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
| 2026-03-17 | treehouse ships, the worktree pool. It is the first tool in the stack. ↗ |
| 2026-03-28 | "MCP vs CLI vs AXI" browser benchmark (985 runs). This is the first public use of "AXI". ↗ |
| 2026-04-08 | chrome-devtools-axi released as the reference AXI. ↗ |
| 2026-04-20 | git push no-mistakes revealed as his daily push command. ↗ |
| 2026-04-28 | gnhf passes 1,000 stars. ↗ |
| 2026-05-10 | "68% of the changes made by agents had a mistake in it", caught by no-mistakes. ↗ |
| 2026-05-12 | lavish-axi: "HTML is the new markdown." ↗ |
| 2026-06-08 | /no-mistakes ships as a skill. ↗ |
| 2026-06-11 | firstmate's first commit (feat: initial commit). |
| 2026-06-18 | First public mention of firstmate, with lavish and no-mistakes integrated. ↗ |
| 2026-06-26 | Parallel sessions go from 3–5 to 10–20 with firstmate. ↗ |
| 2026-06-27 | 10,000 combined GitHub stars, three months after leaving big tech. ↗ |
| 2026-06-29 | @myfirstmate (Relay): talk to your firstmate from X. ↗ |
| 2026-06-30 | Intelligent harness routing (dispatch rules), and the 3-hour self-deploy from one tweet. ↗ |
| 2026-07-03 | Herdr backend and /stow. ↗ |
| 2026-07-04 | Orca and cmux backends. cmux was "built e2e from a single tweet". ↗ |
| 2026-07-08 | quota-axi launches; firstmate is mapped onto Anthropic's orchestrator patterns. ↗ |
| 2026-07-12 | firstmate passes 1,000 stars; "agent distro" is named. ↗ |
| 2026-07-17 | "code is no longer code, it's intent". ↗ |
| 2026-08-05 | Multi-machine setup with remote secondmates and quota-aware routing. ↗ |
| 2026-08-10 | firstmate passes 3,000 stars; the origin story. ↗ |
| 2026-08-17 | /vision skill. ↗ |
| 2026-08-18 | Grok Bot first-mate template (GROK_BOT.md). ↗ |
| 2026-08-24 | Pi multi-brain supervision branch. ↗ |
| 2026-08-31 | The tmux "team wipe" story behind "restart should be a non-event". ↗ |
| 2026-09-17 | Jev typed dispatch: −71% cost, −90% time for routing. ↗ |
| 2026-09-22 | Community RGB lamp article; Kun proposes the fleet ledger. ↗ |
| 2026-09-25 | Five-bucket model org chart; the "reasoning effort is a ceiling" crash course. ↗ |
| 2026-09-26 | Repo at 801 commits, ~7.2k stars. This guide's snapshot (72b63eee). |
Quotes worth keeping#
On why firstmate exists#
it was to create an experience. a feeling. a sense of peacefulness that was taken away by the noisy agents... it's the experience of being a good captain that sails with a well-managed crew, with the help of a firstmate that carries out the captain's direction. — 2026-08-10
firstmate is THE chief of staff - it's probably the project that pushed the furthest on this pattern. the most common feedback from people who have adopted firstmate is 'there's no way to go back.' — 2026-09-07
chat, as a sequential stream of messages, has a fundamental flaw that it's chronologically structured and assumes a turn by turn interaction... the most important thing that needs my attention is often not the latest thing at the bottom of the chat. — 2026-08-19
That is why /bearings and /ahoy exist.
On design#
the agent's context window is like our computer's 'memory'... anything that needs to serve as a durable record should not be trusted to stay only in the context window. they must be pushed and persisted onto the disk, and made discoverable by the agent. — 2026-08-31
this setup allows the agent to be completely self-aware and self-evolvable. it can answer any question about its own behavior, and it can change every bit of itself according to your needs (now the unintended side effect is that i have 500+ PRs coming from everyone using their firstmate to self evolve). — 2026-08-10
firstmate runs in the orchestrator pattern by default. it plans and delegates work to crewmates. and when a crewmate runs into problems, they escalate back to firstmate for guidance. — 2026-07-08
one fresh example of the advantage of being vendor-agnostic - i could ship a jev integration in firstmate the same day jev was released. anthropic can't. — 2026-09-17
On agents and code#
i'm slowly realizing that the code i'm writing is no longer code... it's intent. it's 'here's what i want.' intent doesn't crash and can't be broken. — 2026-07-17
What happened when a firstmate script broke: "it ran the script, saw it fail, created a workaround, and recorded a memory to use the workaround ever since."
use a proper validation pipeline like /no-mistakes — the impact is equal to introducing peer review and CI to a team where everyone always push directly to main. — 2026-07-03
sol will remodel my kitchen before making me breakfast. opus 5 will go down rabbit holes and come back with an essay but no rabbit. — 2026-08-13
one thing the recent model releases have consistently told us is that public benchmarks are completely useless now — 2026-09-04