TIL something really useful in Firstmate by
@kunchenguid.
I was working in a completely separate Grok build session, outside the Firstmate repo, and asked:
“What is the most effective way to hand this work off to my Firstmate orchestrator?”
It went digging and found `fm-inbox`.
So apparently there is no need to wait for the Firstmate chat to free up or manually copy everything over.
From another agent/session:
`Firstmate/bin/fm-inbox.sh note "your message"`
That writes a durable note to disk and pings Firstmate to pick it up on its next check.
That means another agent can basically walk up to the orchestrator and leave work on its desk while it’s busy.
Even better for larger tasks:
The note is the doorbell. The file is the brief.
Put the full handoff packet in a file, then send Firstmate a short note pointing to it.
Now Grok, Codex, Claude, etc, can finish a chunk of work and hand the next step to Firstmate without needing the orchestrator session itself to be available.
That is way more useful than I realized.
Also in the same binary:
- `list` - see what’s waiting
- `status` - see what’s happening without interrupting
- `ask` - side-question a model without turning it into fleet work
- `say` - speech/output if configured
Yet another Firstmate feature that shows why it’s an actual agent distro: vendor-agnostic coordination infrastructure with durable handoffs between independent sessions - no human meat proxy required.
Firstmate repo: