Skip to content

1.4.2 — search that finds things, and a research prompt that asks only when you mean it

Latest
Latest

Choose a tag to compare

View all tags
@hotheadhacker hotheadhacker released this 24 Oct 18:32
· 144 commits to main since this release
v1.4.2
92a5cee
This commit was created on GitHub.com and signed with GitHub’s verified signature.
GPG key ID: B5690EEEBB952194
Verified
Learn about vigilant mode.

☿ Mercury Agent v1.4.2

Web search finds things again, with no key and with any model, and the research prompt now asks only when you actually want a research article.

Web search

  • Three sources that answer. web_search asks Parallel's public search first (keyless, built for agents, about a second, with excerpts and dates), then DuckDuckGo's html page, then its lite page. Bing's web feed, which had started returning unrelated pages, and the engines that refuse automated requests are gone.
  • DuckDuckGo read exactly. Both pages are parsed from their real markup: the title, the real address behind DuckDuckGo's redirect, and the snippet. Ads are dropped, a bot challenge is retried once, and a page Mercury can't read is reported instead of looking empty.
  • News links open the article. News comes from Parallel's article links, then Bing News with its redirects unwrapped to the publisher, then Google News and Hacker News.
  • Never the model's own search. Results come only from Mercury's search tools, so search works the same whichever model you use.
  • You can see what happened. Every result ends with a Searched: trail, such as Parallel: timed out → DuckDuckGo: 8 results, so "nothing found" and "every source was blocked" read differently.
  • The built-in web-search skill (1.3.0) describes the sources. An installed skill that scraped DuckDuckGo directly is replaced, and your copy is kept as SKILL.md.replaced.bak.

Chat

  • The research prompt asks only when you mean it. It used to fire on words like "latest" or "explain", so instructions such as "convert the latest epub" got a research question. One short model call now decides; instructions, quick questions and today's news never get the prompt.
  • Quick answer comes first, so an accidental Enter never starts a long research run.

Upgrade

npm:

npm install -g @cosmicstack/mercury-agent@1.4.2
mercury restart

Standalone binary: mercury upgrade, or re-run the one-line installer from mercuryagent.sh.

No config changes needed.

Full Changelog: v1.4.1...v1.4.2

Assets 11
Loading