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Co-founder & CEO · Cosmic Stack

Salman Qureshi

Building the runtime for autonomous agents.

I lead Cosmic Stack, an AI-agent lab founded in 2025. We build Mercury Agent, the open-source agent runtime that asks before it acts and remembers what matters, and Mercury Cloud, the hosted control plane that keeps it reachable from anywhere. Before that: ten years of developer tools that 17.6K people have starred.

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Salman Qureshi, Co-founder & CEO of Cosmic Stack
21.4KGitHub stars across all projects
3.2KMercury Agent starssince Apr ’26
11KMercury installs, last 12 monthsnpm only
10years shipping open source

Cosmic Stack

A thesis-first lab for the next decade of software.

Frontier inference is roughly a hundred times cheaper than it was eighteen months ago. Work that cost $40 to automate now costs $0.40. Cosmic Stack exists for what that unlocks: agents that run for hours, hold memory, and are trusted to act. We publish what we learn, ship what we publish, and treat the gap between the two as the central problem in applied AI.

  • LabsPreview

    Research notes on agents, inference and evaluation.

  • IncubatorPreview

    Founder-led companies built on the lab's runtime.

  • Open sourceLive

    Mercury Agent, Lazy Frames and the skills registry.

  • Mercury CloudLive

    Pair a local agent; hosted chat, relay, shared memory and cloud models.

Founded 2025 · Independent · Remote-first

Products

One runtime, four surfaces.

Mercury Agent

LiveMIT

Open-source AI agent that remembers what matters, asks before it acts, and runs 24/7 from CLI, Telegram, Discord, Slack, Signal or web.

3.2K
stars
341
forks
11K
installs / yr
v1.3.0
latest
  • Permission-hardened. Shell blocklist, folder-scoped read/write per channel and role, ask-before-act approval flow. Reads run freely; writes, shell and pushes wait for you.
  • Second Brain. Persistent SQLite + FTS5 memory with ten memory types, auto-extraction and consolidation. One memory shared across every channel.
  • Mercury Code. Repo-aware coding environment with a completion contract: a task only counts as done when a build, test or typecheck actually ran.
  • Mercury Bots. Persistent persona-scoped agents with their own sandbox, budget and durable job queue. Leads recruit crews; fleets run around the clock.
  • ~50 built-in tools, 10+ model providers with fallback, zero telemetry, one-line installer on macOS, Linux and Windows.

Mercury Cloud

Live

The hosted control plane for Mercury. Pair your local agent from the terminal and it stays online and reachable from anywhere, with no port forwarding, reverse proxies or certificates.

  • One-command pairing. mercury cloud connect opens a browser flow; no API keys to copy. Works behind NAT and firewalls. Your local agent stays the source of truth.
  • Remote dashboard at cloud.mercuryagent.sh: chat with your agent, install skills, browse memory, watch status, and sync conversations across devices.
  • Always on. A persistent WebSocket runs in the background daemon with 30-second heartbeats and automatic reconnects, so it survives closing the terminal.
  • Shared knowledge. A memory pool across all your agents, searched after local Second Brain retrieval and cached locally; cloud outages never block a chat turn.
  • Cloud models. Mercury Flash for speed, Mercury Pro for reasoning, through an OpenAI-compatible gateway. Rotating JWTs and a recoverable agent key handle auth.

Lazy Frames

Live

Agentic video generation. Hand an AI agent a skill URL; it captures, writes a spec, runs the gates and renders a byte-identical MP4, fully local.

163
stars
20
forks
1.4K
installs / yr
v0.6.3
latest
  • Spec-driven: typed JSON validated before render, no timeline UI.
  • Deterministic: same spec + same machine = same SHA-256, verified by double render.
  • Runs on headless Chrome, ffmpeg and a Python audio sidecar; no keys required. Plugins declare their permissions before install.
  • Eight scene types, LUT grading, procedural music, TTS narration and SFX in the spec.

Sav.ink

Private beta

Personal AI finance manager. Local-first, on web and iOS.

Private beta. Your financial data stays on your device; the agent reasons over it locally.

Mercury Skills Registry★ 476
$ curl -fsSL https://mercuryagent.sh/install.sh | sh

Standalone binary for macOS and Linux, no Node required. Windows: irm https://mercuryagent.sh/install.ps1 | iex

Traction

Mercury Agent, six months in.

3,173stars341 forks
48releases shippedlatest v1.3.0
11,006npm installs, 12 months1,194 last 30 days
350commits by meof the runtime
Cumulative GitHub starscosmicstack-labs/mercury-agent
01k2k3k4kApr ’26Jun ’26Aug ’26Oct ’263,173
View as table
MonthStars
Apr ’261,776
May ’262,468
Jun ’262,717
Jul ’262,936
Aug ’263,038
Sep ’263,160
Oct ’263,173
npm installs per month@cosmicstack/mercury-agent
02k4k6k5,138Apr ’26Apr ’26: 5,138 InstallsMay ’26: 2,014 InstallsJun ’26Jun ’26: 1,006 InstallsJul ’26: 631 InstallsAug ’26Aug ’26: 910 InstallsSep ’26: 1,241 InstallsOct ’26Oct ’26: 66 Installs
View as table
MonthInstalls
Apr ’265,138
May ’262,014
Jun ’261,006
Jul ’26631
Aug ’26910
Sep ’261,241
Oct ’2666

Numbers fetched from the GitHub and npm APIs at build time, 8 Oct 2026. Standalone-binary installs from mercuryagent.sh are not counted.

Before Cosmic Stack

17.6K stars across 64 open-source projects.

Developer tools, self-hosting utilities and the odd viral micro-API. Each one shipped, documented and maintained in public.

No-as-a-Service

LiveMIT

A tiny API that returns a random, realistic rejection reason. Went viral; now one of the most-starred micro-APIs on GitHub.

8K
stars
497
forks

Seedbox Lite

Live

A lightweight, self-hosted torrent media center in one place.

4.5K
stars
349
forks

YouTube Player

LiveApache-2.0

A sleek desktop YouTube player built with Electron.

780
stars
55
forks
un-grok★ 67Free Resume Maker★ 60next-markdown★ 21Akkoma Blog★ 20WHOIS API★ 9Who's at Home★ 4Sekond Brain★ 2

Also: four apps on Google Play and a developer blog.

About

Developer first, founder second.

I grew up in Kashmir and learned to build by shipping: an office-management system for a travel company, a journal-publishing platform, prayer-time and Ramadan-calendar apps that are still on Google Play. Then open source took over. A torrent media centre, a free résumé maker, a curated map of everything you can self-host, and one joke API that returns a polite "no". Together they've been starred by more than 17,000 developers and forked over a thousand times.

Cosmic Stack is that habit, pointed at agents. I co-founded it in 2025 and lead it as CEO and head of agentic AI and framework engineering. I set the technical direction and write most of the runtime myself: 350 of Mercury's commits are mine. The thesis is simple. Agents will do real work when they ask before they act, remember what matters, and can be trusted to run unattended. That's the product, and it's also the bet.

Lovely Professional University. Co-host of The Art of Open-Source. Working remotely.

  1. 2016First open-source projects on GitHub.
  2. 2021 – 24Ships self-hosting tools, Play Store apps and a developer blog from Kashmir.
  3. 2025Founds Cosmic Stack. no-as-a-service passes 8k stars.
  4. Apr 2026Mercury Agent launches; 1,776 stars in the first month.
  5. Aug 2026Lazy Frames: deterministic, agent-driven video generation.
  6. Sep 2026Mercury Cloud pairing ships: hosted chat, relay and cloud models for any local agent.
  7. Oct 2026Mercury v1.3.0 — persistent bot fleets with leads and crews.

Let's talk.

Investors, partners and people who want to build on Mercury: thirty minutes is easy to find.

Book a callsalman@cosmicstack.ai

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