1.0.3
published 2 November 2026
Mercury CLI 1.0.3 brings the crew into the conversation. Swarm is on by default: crewmates' posts show as rows in the main chat as they arrive, each in its own colour, and /general, /team and /whisper talk back to them; captains and declared waits organise larger crews. The release also repairs the prompt-cache misses of long crew sessions, lets small-window local models work without compacting at once, gives local engines language services, and makes every update refusal end with the reinstall command for your installation.
Added
- Added swarm chat in the main chat: with swarm on, board messages show as they arrive, each its own row with its time and the crewmate's colour, landing between the lead's blocks; a crewmate joining or parking shows the same way, a crewmate finishing as its completion notice; the turn summary counts tool work only. /swarmchat alone turns it off for the session; /swarmchat all, team <name> or main chooses which new messages show.
- Added /general, /team and /whisper to post directly to crewmates: every crewmate, one team (its captain, when it has one), or one crewmate, with names completing as you type. Your posts carry your own label and reach the lead too; ordinary prompts still go only to the lead.
- Added captains, named by the lead for a team of five or more crewmates, or for a smaller team when you ask or a crewmate asks and the lead agrees; a captain gathers its team's work and reports it to the lead.
- Added declared waits: a parked crewmate waiting for another crewmate's post, a file or subject, a message kind or its team's traffic is resumed by a matching message or a post addressed to it, with the message that woke it; broadcasts do not resume anyone.
- Added an OCR row to mercury health: the engine in use (Vision, Windows OCR or Tesseract) with its languages, or why none is available.
- Added directory leases: a crewmate leases a folder with a trailing slash as one lease covering everything under it, and lease listings name each holder with its count and folder.
Changed
- Changed Swarm to be on for new sessions by default; /swarm off turns it off for a session and /swarm on turns it back on. Resumed sessions keep their choice. The Swarm row in /config is the master switch.
- Changed Crew chat in the Workbench to wrap each message to three lines in the timeline, with the full text in the thread.
- Changed /crew to say why a parked crewmate is waiting: the post it waits for, or a worktree that is missing.
- Changed housekeeping to keep Node's compile cache under 512 MiB and 8,192 files, retiring the oldest entries at start-up.
- Changed the model retirement notice to know Anthropic's current dates: Claude Sonnet 4.5 retires on November 30, 2026, and Claude Opus 4.1, Sonnet 4 and Opus 4 are retired.
- Changed /swarmchat to accept on and off as well as the bare toggle.
Fixed
- Fixed a crew-board notice or a finished command's output landing in the composer after a sign-in failure.
- Fixed a resumed session forgetting its swarm switch; /swarm on survives a resume.
- Fixed command messages after the last reply disappearing when a session is resumed or opened in another window.
- Fixed a slash command typed while Mercury is working being sent to the model as text; it now runs after the turn, in the order typed.
- Fixed a stray line beginning xt does not name an installed version after a refused update rollback on Windows.
- Fixed a check that started before an edit and finished after it counting as verification of the edited tree; the evidence now binds to the tree the check ran on.
- Fixed mercury update refusals to end with the reinstall command for your installation method.
- Fixed prompt-cache misses in long crew sessions: a crewmate re-entering no longer rewrites its system prompt with the live crew list, and a conversation's 21st image no longer resizes the earlier images in place.
- Fixed small-window local models compacting almost at once: the turn reserve follows the model's window, and local setup asks for the model's trained context when the loaded one is smaller.
- Fixed local models running without language services; a local engine now gets the same lazily started servers as a cloud one.
- Fixed a refused crewmate launch painting as a finished crewmate; it paints as the refusal, and the turn summary counts only launches that happened.
- Fixed mercury health --json creating crew-board files; the board opens only when a crewmate launches, a board command runs or chat first paints.
- Fixed a language server that could not start for a missing rustup component retrying every 15 seconds; the failure names the rustup command and the next call tries again.
- Fixed a fast burst of keys, such as a held Backspace or a long paste, stopping the screen; the keys are applied in order.
- Fixed the mouse wheel in the classic Windows console typing arrow keys into the draft; the wheel scrolls the transcript and the draft stays.
- Fixed Windows starting a second background daemon when the home folder was reached by another spelling of its path.
- Fixed interrupting a Python Eval cell on Windows losing the kernel's variables; the cell stops and the state stays.
- Fixed one crewmate's large set of file leases stalling every other crewmate's lease calls for minutes; a lease call now takes milliseconds whatever the others hold, and a failing one answers with its reason.