What a crew is
One AI agent in one terminal is a helper. You sit with it while it works, and when you want three things done at once you end up with three terminals and no idea which one had the failing test.
Firstmate turns that into a team. You talk to a single agent, the first mate, and it runs other agents for you. Each one gets its own task and its own copy of the code. The first mate keeps an eye on all of them and comes back to you when something needs a decision.
Firstmate is free and open source under the MIT licence, made by Kun Chen. It is not an app you install. It is a folder of instructions, skills and small scripts. When you start Claude Code inside that folder, Claude Code reads the instructions and becomes your first mate. Claude Code is the coding agent from Anthropic, and it comes with any paid Claude plan.
Unattended Crew is an independent guide to setting it up and running it. It is not part of the Firstmate project.
The three roles
Firstmate is built around ship words for the people and agents involved. The docs and this course use them. In its replies to you, the first mate keeps to plain words and calls a crewmate a worker.
- Captain
- You. You give requests, make the decisions and say "merge it". You never have to watch the work.
- First mate
- The one agent you talk to. It plans, hands out tasks, checks the results and asks you only what only you can answer.
- Crewmate
- A worker agent with one task and its own copy of the project, so two workers never trip over each other.
What a crewmate does
A task is one piece of work with a clear end. There are two kinds.
A ship task changes something. The crewmate works in its own copy of your project, then hands back a change for you to approve: on GitHub that is a pull request. Nothing reaches your real code until you say yes.
A scout task finds something out. The crewmate researches, investigates or plans, and leaves a written report. Nothing in your project changes.
This course, its research and the page you are reading came out of tasks like these.
Over time you can give crewmates standing roles. Mine have names: Zach handles bookings, Amy does outreach, Andrew researches, Daniel plans with me and Charles takes the first calls. Each is a role I set up with its own skills and the tools I connect, not something Firstmate ships with. The free course uses one plain crewmate, which is all you need to start.
What you need for lesson 2
- A Mac or a Linux computer. Firstmate supports macOS and Linux.
- A GitHub account. The course uses GitHub throughout, and Firstmate's setup signs in to it.
- A paid Claude plan. Pro is $20 a month and includes Claude Code. The free Claude plan does not.
- A terminal you are willing to paste a few commands into.
You do not need to write code. You will type requests in plain English.