v1.3.1 — Steady Mercury

The release where Mercury stays out of your way.

1.3.1 is about the shape of the thing: one process runs your bots and your channels, and the terminal is a window onto it — open in under a second, closed without consequence. Bots now do work instead of writing notes about work, deliver files where you can find them, stay online without burning tokens, and can be run from your phone. Underneath, Node 22 and a patched Ink 8 renderer; alongside, everything from the earlier, unpublished "Honest Mercury" work — chat that answers, "done" that means verified, and six security fixes.

At a glance

One runtime (ADR-024)	The daemon owns channels, bots and the web port; mercury attaches to it. No second copy of the fleet in your terminal.
Instant attach	Listener binds first at boot; /api/health answers with pid/version; a foreign process on the port is named, not restarted around.
Bots that do work (ADR-020)	Per-turn caps, outcome judged from the tool trace, daily budgets on by default, deliverables in ~/Documents/Mercury/<Bot>/.
Fleets that coordinate (ADR-021)	Typed tasks with one digest wake, pipelines as data, bots that remember.
Operate the fleet (ADR-022)	/bots cost, /bots show, /bots stop all, DLQ clear, budget presets.
Bots in your pocket (ADR-023)	Telegram command menu, tappable roster, files pushed to the chat, onboarding with native buttons.
Bots stay online	No-outcome routines cool down and auto-resume; declared cadence honoured; doctor flags stale bots.
Node 22 + Ink 8	Required for npm installs; binaries unaffected. Four Mercury hunks on Ink 8, upstreaming.

One runtime — the terminal attaches

Launching mercury with no daemon used to spawn one and boot a second full runtime in the terminal. Both ran the fleet on one queue, both polled Telegram (409 conflicts), and the terminal copy ran every bot turn on the thread that paints your keystrokes. Now the terminal spawns the daemon and attaches; a foreground runtime beside a live daemon (mercury code) is a terminal for the main agent only. The event loop is measured: /api/health.loopLag, and stalls ≥250 ms are logged.

Your login service follows the install: after a reinstall (npm → binary, stable → dev, new Node) the old LaunchAgent/systemd unit/Task used to keep resurrecting the old daemon. Mercury now re-points it on launch, on macOS, Linux and Windows. mercury doctor → Login service: points at this install.

Bots that do work

• Caps and compaction — 300k tokens / 20 min per turn; context compacted automatically.
• Judged by the trace — a run is deliverable, action, delegated, message or none; a reply that claims more than the trace shows is flagged.
• Budgets by default — 5M tokens/day per bot, 20M per fleet; warned at 80%, paused until tomorrow at 100%.
• Deliverables you can find — bot_deliver files land in ~/Documents/Mercury/<Bot name>/, finals on top, crew work under work/, README index. Legacy outputs migrate on first start.
• Routines honoured — a bot.yaml cadence runs as written; bot-created routines ≥30 min; three empty runs cool a routine down (6 h → 24 h) and it resumes by itself.

Fleets that coordinate

fleet_delegate hands several typed tasks to the crew and wakes the lead once with a digest. Pipelines are data in bot.yaml (research → draft → check → package), stages chain themselves, finals are promoted. Every turn starts with a digest of the last five runs and the bot's own working-state note; durable facts go into the bot's memory.

Operate it — from the terminal or a phone

/bots cost [days], /bots show <id> [runId], /bots stop all / start all, /bots dlq clear, /bots doctor, /bots outputs, /bots fetch. On Telegram: /bots and /bot in the command menu; the roster arrives with Stop/Start · Run · Runs per bot and Cost · Outputs · Doctor · Stop all — a tap runs the real command. Delivered files come back to the chat as attachments. /bots create on Telegram runs the full onboarding — persona, permissions tier, solo/fleet, budget — as native buttons that settle in place.

Honest Mercury — the earlier 1.3.1 work, folded in

Never published on its own; everything from it ships here: chat no longer forced through tool rounds, "done" means a check actually passed, one feedback contract on every channel, /trace, /new everywhere, context window v2, memory bounds, Telegram prompt timeouts that say what they defaulted to, per-agent permission contexts, the replay eval harness, and six published security advisories (GHSA-hj5j-2689-x8r2, -xc4h-859q-mq79, -gc84-h2g2-h54w, -h2c6-h3vx-mqwh, -qjx7-rw28-6hxq, -r27w-9m8h-qwg8).

Node 22 and a patched Ink 8

Mercury's terminal renderer moves to Ink 8 + React 19, which needs Node 22. Stock Ink's <Static> is positional — a bounded transcript remounted the whole subtree every frame — and tall frames stamped copies into scrollback on every repaint. Mercury vendors Ink 8 with four hunks (keyed static, scrollback guard, freeze gate, IME cursor anchor), verified in CI as tarball + hunks, and is proposing them upstream from cosmicstack-labs/ink.

Known limitations

• The attach TUI (what mercury now opens) does not yet have bot threads (/bots open) or the /telegram / /discord / /slack menus. Use /bots send <id> <message>, mercury telegram … from the shell, or mercury code for the in-process TUI. First item of the next release.
• Bots share the daemon's thread with the main agent — bounded, not isolated. loopLag will tell you if it ever matters.

Upgrade

Standalone binaries — nothing to think about:

curl -fsSL https://mercuryagent.sh/install.sh | sh   # macOS / Linux
irm https://mercuryagent.sh/install.ps1 | iex          # Windows

npm — check Node first:

node -v                                   # must be 22+
nvm install 22 && nvm alias default 22    # if it is not
npm i -g @cosmicstack/mercury-agent@1.3.1
mercury                                   # re-points your login service, migrates bot outputs, attaches

mercury upgrade checks the Node requirement before it removes anything; the package refuses to install on an older Node with a readable message. ~/.mercury carries over untouched.