/secondmate-provisioning

Skill type: Agent-only
Upstream path: .agents/skills/secondmate-provisioning/SKILL.md

The lifecycle for persistent delegated Firstmate homes.

What it does

secondmate-provisioning owns persistent secondmate setup, routing-table records, seeding, launching, synchronization, inherited configuration, backlog handoff, recovery, and retirement.

A second mate is not just another worker. It has a durable home, charter, domain scope, backlog, local or remote placement, and its own supervised crews.

When to reach for it

Load it when creating, seeding, validating, launching, recovering, handing backlog to, synchronizing, or retiring a second mate, and before editing data/secondmates.md.

How it behaves

Routing is based on natural-language scope:. The projects: field is a clone list, not ownership.

Local secondmate homes can be durably leased. Whole remote homes use an explicit remote route and are readiness-checked before seed or launch.

Tracked Firstmate updates converge into the persistent home through guarded fast-forward rules. A declared set of gitignored configuration and shared captain-preference material is propagated separately, with ownership and read-only rules preserved.

The secondmate's own launch harness can be pinned independently from the harness its crewmates inherit.

Common questions

Does a project listed under a second mate mean that mate owns every related request? No. Scope is authoritative; the project list is not.

Can Firstmate edit a secondmate copy of shared captain preferences and sync it back? No. The primary home is authoritative for the shared preference file.

It's working if

Domain routing follows declared scope.
Persistent homes survive restart without losing their charter or backlog.
Dirty or divergent homes are never force-updated.
Remote routes preserve their placement and do not silently fall back to local work.
Inherited material converges without overwriting unrelated local state.

Where it fits

This is the persistent-delegation layer above ordinary crewmates. It works with harness-adapters, project-management, updatefirstmate, and the remote event/supervision paths.

Upstream: .agents/skills/secondmate-provisioning/SKILL.md