| name | secondmate-provisioning |
| description | Agent-only reference for persistent secondmate setup and retirement. Use when creating, seeding, validating, launching, recovering, handing backlog to, pushing inherited config into, or retiring a secondmate home, or when editing data/secondmates.md. Covers home leases, transactional seeding, project clone restrictions, secondmate harness pins, inherited config push, idle charter, handoff helper, and teardown safety. |
| user-invocable | false |
| metadata | {"internal":true} |
secondmate-provisioning
Use this reference before creating, seeding, validating, launching, handing backlog to, recovering, pushing inherited config 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 line per persistent domain supervisor:
- <id> - <charter summary> (home: <absolute-home-path>; scope: <natural-language responsibility>; projects: <project-a>, <project-b>; added <date>)
The scope: field is used during intake.
The projects: field is a non-exclusive clone list, not ownership.
Charter and seed
Scaffold a secondmate charter with:
bin/fm-brief.sh <id> --secondmate {<project>...|--no-projects}
The scaffold writes a charter brief instead of a task brief.
Set FM_SECONDMATE_CHARTER='<charter>' to fill the charter text and FM_SECONDMATE_SCOPE='<scope>' when the routing scope differs.
If you scaffold without FM_SECONDMATE_CHARTER, replace the {TASK} placeholder before seeding.
Pass --no-projects instead of a project list to scaffold a project-less charter for a domain whose subject is the firstmate repo itself, whose home is a firstmate worktree and whose crews take pooled worktrees of the same repo.
--no-projects is mutually exclusive with a project list, and omitting both still fails loudly, so an accidental omission is never mistaken for a deliberate project-less seed.
Re-seeding a populated home as project-less is refused non-destructively when the home contains project clones or data/projects.md entries.
Retire or clean that home first, and re-scaffold a stale project-bearing charter with --no-projects before seeding.
Keep the charter focused on the persistent responsibility, available project clones, escalation back to the main firstmate status file, and the requests-from-main-firstmate contract.
The scaffold's definition of done encodes the idle-by-default contract: on startup the secondmate reconciles only its own in-flight work and then waits for routed tasks, never self-initiating a survey or audit.
Preserve that wording when filling the charter, including the marker rule that marked supervisor requests return through status or a doc pointer while unmarked captain messages stay conversational.
Provision the persistent home and registry entry after the charter is filled:
bin/fm-home-seed.sh <id> <home|-> {<project>...|--no-projects}
Pass --no-projects in the project position to seed the project-less home described above; the same mutual-exclusion and fail-loud-on-omission rules apply.
It may only seed a home with no project clones or project-registry entries, and refuses conversion of populated homes without changing them.
- durably leases a fresh firstmate worktree via treehouse get --lease under the secondmate id.
The lease survives with no live process and is never recycled by later treehouse get or prune.
The slot stays reserved across restarts until the lease is released.
Release happens only on explicit retirement or seed rollback, never on routine restart or recovery.
bin/fm-home-seed.sh copies the charter into the secondmate home as data/charter.md.
It also writes the required .fm-secondmate-home identity marker, which is gitignored and must remain in place for home validation.
bin/fm-spawn.sh --secondmate launches it through the secondmate harness path, resolving config/secondmate-harness -> config/crew-harness -> the primary's own harness unless an explicit per-spawn harness override is passed.
config/secondmate-harness may also pin a concrete model and effort for the secondmate agent, in the SAME file rather than a new one: the format is a single whitespace-separated line <harness> [<model>] [<effort>], with only the first non-empty, non-comment line parsed.
A bare <harness> (today's format, e.g. claude) behaves exactly as before - harness only, no model/effort flag - so this is fully backward-compatible.
bin/fm-harness.sh secondmate-model and bin/fm-harness.sh secondmate-effort print the optional 2nd/3rd tokens (empty when absent, or when the file is absent/default/harness-only); they read only config/secondmate-harness, never config/crew-harness, which stays a bare adapter name.
For a --secondmate spawn, bin/fm-spawn.sh populates MODEL/EFFORT from those tokens only when the harness itself came from the secondmate config path for that spawn.
An explicit per-spawn --harness flag, positional harness arg, or raw launch command starts clean on model and effort too, unless the caller also passes explicit --model or --effort.
When the file's tokens do apply, an explicit per-spawn --model or --effort flag always wins over the file's token for that axis.
Because this resolves from the file on every spawn, the pin is durable across every respawn (recovery, /updatefirstmate, restart) exactly like the harness axis itself - e.g. config/secondmate-harness containing claude opus keeps a secondmate pinned to Opus even if the primary's own default model later changes.
This is secondmate-only: crewmate/scout model resolution is untouched by this file.
This section is the single owner of the secondmate sync and inheritable-config propagation contract; AGENTS.md sections 3 and 4 point here.
Before launch, fm-spawn.sh --secondmate locally fast-forwards the home to the primary firstmate checkout's current default-branch commit when it is safe; dirty, diverged, or in-flight homes launch unchanged with a warning.
The locked session-start bootstrap sweep runs the same guarded fast-forward for every live secondmate home, discovered from state/<id>.meta records with kind=secondmate (data/secondmates.md only backfills home= for older records).
That no-fetch path is a purely local fast-forward of tracked files, never an origin fetch, and it never touches the gitignored operational dirs, so a secondmate's backlog, projects, and in-flight work are never disturbed; a linked worktree advances immediately, while a standalone clone that lacks the target receives firstmate updates through /updatefirstmate's origin refresh.
The same launch and the same locked bootstrap sweep also propagate the primary's declared inheritable local config, currently config/crew-dispatch.json, config/crew-harness, and config/backlog-backend, into the secondmate home's config/.
Because config/ is gitignored, that propagation is a separate, primary-authoritative copy independent of the tracked-files fast-forward: it re-converges every live home whether or not its tracked files advanced, and it touches only the declared items.
Inheritance copies the literal config/crew-harness file, so a secondmate's own crewmates use the primary's crewmate harness only when it names a concrete adapter such as codex; an unset or default value has nothing concrete to inherit, and the secondmate's own crewmates fall back to the secondmate's own or detected harness instead.
config/secondmate-harness is not inherited because it is only the primary's knob for launching secondmate agents.
No reread nudge is needed at spawn or respawn because the agent reads AGENTS.md fresh on launch; only the bootstrap sweep's NUDGE_SECONDMATES: case (a RUNNING home whose instruction surface advanced) needs one.
For already-live secondmates, use bin/fm-config-push.sh to push a mid-session inherited-config change without running the tracked-file fast-forward or nudging the agents.
It uses the same live-home discovery and propagation helper as bootstrap and reports each item as pushed, unchanged, skipped, or error.
bin/fm-home-seed.sh refuses to copy a missing or placeholder charter.
Direct seed without a preexisting brief requires FM_SECONDMATE_CHARTER.
Run bin/fm-home-seed.sh validate when checking registry integrity; it refuses duplicate ids, duplicate homes, and nested or overlapping homes.
Seeding is transactional.
If validation, cloning, no-mistakes initialization, or registry update fails, generated briefs, new homes, new project clones, and registry edits are rolled back.
Secondmate project lists may include no-mistakes and direct-PR projects only.
local-only projects stay with the main firstmate.
For no-mistakes projects, seeding initializes only projects newly cloned into a secondmate home and refuses to mutate a preexisting clone that is not already initialized.
Backlog handoff
Apply AGENTS.md section 10's work-items-only backlog contract before creation or handoff.
When a secondmate is created for a domain, existing main-backlog items that fall under its scope should become its work instead of staying stranded in the main backlog.
Scope-matching is firstmate's judgment against the secondmate's natural-language scope, not a keyword rule.
Read data/backlog.md, pick queued items that fit the new scope, and move them with:
bin/fm-backlog-handoff.sh <secondmate-id> <item-key>...
After seeding, run this handoff for the new secondmate's in-scope queued items.
The helper resolves and validates the secondmate home from data/secondmates.md, then delegates the item move to tasks-axi mv (the single owner of the backlog format), which moves each named item - and a whole connected set, blocker plus dependents, atomically - from the main data/backlog.md into the secondmate home's data/backlog.md.
This delegated route remains required when config/backlog-backend=manual, which controls only routine firstmate backlog edits.
It moves each queued item's whole block - the - [ ] <id> ... header plus every following two-or-more-space-indented body line and blank separator, up to the next item or column-0 section heading - byte-exact under the same section, treating an indented ## ... line as body rather than a section boundary, so neither the header nor its body is duplicated or orphaned.
It refuses a selected item with a single-space or tab-indented continuation rather than risk leaving content orphaned in the main backlog.
It accepts in-scope ## Queued entries only and refuses ## In flight and historical ## Done entries.
Done records stay with their home for pruning or archiving.
It is idempotent; an item already in the secondmate backlog is skipped.
It refuses any destination that is not a genuine seeded firstmate home with safe operational directories and a matching .fm-secondmate-home marker, so a move can never land in a project.
Do not hand off local-only items.
Recovery
For kind=secondmate meta with no window, treat the secondmate as a dead persistent direct report and respawn it with:
bin/fm-spawn.sh <id> --secondmate
Use the recorded home= in meta.
If meta is missing but data/secondmates.md still registers the secondmate, respawn from the registry entry and its persistent on-disk home.
Respawn re-resolves the secondmate harness from current config, uses the same guarded pre-launch sync, and re-propagates inheritable config, so recovered secondmates converge to the primary firstmate version and local dispatch, crew-harness, and backlog-backend settings whenever their home can be cleanly fast-forwarded.
If the secondmate is already running and only inherited config changed, prefer bin/fm-config-push.sh over respawning.
Do not reconstruct a secondmate's whole tree from the main home.
The main firstmate reconciles only direct reports.
Each secondmate is a firstmate in its own home, so it runs recovery on startup and reconciles its own crewmates.
A secondmate's recovery reconciles only work that is already its own and then idles.
It never initiates a survey or audit during recovery.
Retirement and teardown
A secondmate is persistent by default.
An empty queue is healthy and does not trigger teardown.
Run bin/fm-teardown.sh <id> for kind=secondmate only when the captain or main firstmate explicitly decides to retire that persistent supervisor.
The safety check is the secondmate's own home.
Teardown refuses while its state/*.meta contains in-flight work.
When safe, teardown kills the direct tmux window, removes the data/secondmates.md route, clears the main home metadata, and removes the retired secondmate home.
Removing a leased home releases its durable treehouse lease via treehouse return, so the pool slot is freed for reuse rather than left leased forever.
A plain-clone home with no pool slot is simply removed.
If treehouse return fails for a leased home, teardown stops with state intact rather than raw-removing the directory and hiding a held lease.
With --force, teardown is the explicit discard path.
It kills child windows, discards child work and state inside the secondmate home, removes the route, releases the lease, and removes the retired secondmate home.
Never use --force unless the captain explicitly said to discard the work.
