Napkin note

The first interface for agents was a text box because a text box was the fastest way to make intelligence feel reachable.

But teams do not work as a single thread. They branch, wait, escalate, remember, and return. A useful agent interface has to make that shape visible without forcing the human to supervise every handoff.

The next interface is not just chat with better buttons. It is a control surface for distributed work: who owns what, what changed, what needs approval, and what the system already knows.

That is the design problem we keep coming back to at Mercury. Coordination is the product.