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First-Time Setup

Run mercury for the first time. The onboarding wizard asks for:

  • Your name — used by the agent to address you
  • Agent name — defaults to "Mercury", customize it
  • LLM providers — choose one or more: DeepSeek, OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Ollama Cloud, Ollama Local, or OpenAI Compatible
  • Model selection — after each valid key, Mercury fetches recommended chat models and lets you choose a default
  • Telegram bot token — optional, for remote access in private 1:1 chats

Provider keys are validated by format and then by fetching available models. If model discovery fails, Mercury asks you to re-enter the key instead of accepting random text.

If you enable Telegram during first-time setup, Mercury starts a temporary pairing flow: send /start to your bot in Telegram, copy the pairing code you receive there, then paste that code into the CLI to finish setup.

All config is stored in ~/.mercury/ — nothing in your project directory.

Masked keys

When reconfiguring with mercury doctor, existing API keys are shown masked like sk-x••••4f2a. Press Enter to keep the current value, or paste a new key to replace it.