David Ondrej and Kun Chen demonstrate First Mate, Kun Chen's supervising agent for running multiple coding workers in parallel while preserving one place for planning, delegation and progress tracking.
Kun Chen describes an escalation ladder in which workers resolve routine choices, raise ambiguous product decisions to the supervisor and involve the human only when a trade-off needs judgment. David Ondrej tests the approach by steering a live build and examining how the agent recovers from mistakes.
David Ondrej and Kun Chen emphasize validation before completion. Generated changes are not treated as finished until tests, linting and structured checks pass, and the supervisor can reassign failures for repair.
Kun Chen calls the broader interface idea AXI: software should expose agent-efficient commands and machine-readable surfaces instead of forcing agents through visual interfaces. David Ondrej connects this to headless, API-first product design.
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