How Optimus works: an agent that uses your computer
Inside Optimus, the Mercury plugin that sees your screen, moves the mouse and types: its processes, how it looks and acts, voice control, and the safety rails.
Salman QureshiMercury Blog · Topic
Engineering
How Mercury is built, what broke, and what we changed so it does not break again. 5 posts.
Salman Qureshi
The new bottleneck in AI coding isn't code generation. It's verification.
A Harvard working paper finds coding agents raised code output while review time rose 49%. Why verification, not generation, should decide whether an agent is useful.
tashiriskhan
Mercury Bots: an agent fleet that runs on your machine
Always-on agents shipped everywhere this autumn. How Mercury Bots work, what we measured, how they compare with Grok Bot, OpenAI dots, Meta Muse, OpenClaw and Hermes Agent, and the commits behind it.
Salman Qureshi
The setup wizard that quit at the first menu
For six releases, a brand-new Mercury install asked for your name, showed one menu, and exited without an error. A walkthrough of a one-tick race between two readers of the same terminal, and the test that now keeps it from coming back.
Mercury Engineering
We were running Mercury twice and didn't know it
Typing felt sluggish on every machine, and the terminal renderer took the blame. The real cause was a second full copy of the agent, started quietly by the launcher. How we found it, and why the fix was an architecture change rather than a performance tweak.
Salman Qureshi