← newsletter

DevLog #9: Cursor Joins the Crew, Chat Moves to the Browser, and Sessions Survive a Deploy

It was a loud week in the busiest room of the house. The headline is a new agent and a new front door, but the part I quietly respect most is the pile of fixes that keep a session alive when the ground moves under it.

A New Agent Joins the Bench

• Cursor is now a first-class agent. It runs over ACP, ships in the base session image, and is selectable like any other agent — no feature flag required — with its own model catalog so you pick the right Cursor model for the job.
• Per-agent credentials, configured in place. Agents that need their own API key now get a Configure button and a credential modal in the broker UI, so wiring up a key-based agent (Cursor is the first) no longer means a detour through setup.

Chat Moves Into the Browser

The broker UI grew a real, built-in chat application, and it is now the default landing page — open the broker and you land in a clean conversation, not a dashboard. Replies stream inside the broker over the session relay rather than bouncing you off to a sprite-served page. Code, tables, images, and files surface into a dedicated artifact pane beside the conversation; a settings slide-over lets you switch the org-default provider or skillset and deep-link into admin pages; and a history sidebar keeps past conversations in your browser so you can list, switch, rename, and delete them across refreshes. Sessions, fleet, and the rest are still one click away in the nav.

Steer Mid-Flight From Slack

• !model switches the model mid-thread. A new Slack command opens a picker to change a running thread’s model without starting over, and the choice persists across restarts.
• !provider switches the whole agent. Move a live thread between Claude, Codex, Gemini, and Cursor on the fly — the prior transcript is bridged into the new sprite so the conversation carries over.
• !skillsets can lead with a task. !skillsets <name> <prompt> now switches personality and hands it a first task in a single message, on both Slack and Discord, and Discord skillset names are no longer tripped up by mixed case.

More to Plug In

• LaunchDarkly joined the one-click MCP catalog over OAuth, so an agent can read flags and targeting while it works.
• An alpha E2B provider landed as a new backend for running sessions, with native pause and resume — early days, but another option under the hood.

Admins Get More Dials

• Admin-only environment variables. Admins can now mark a custom env var as admin-only, so members can’t see, edit, or delete it — useful for secrets the whole org shouldn’t hold.
• Self-service Google Workspace linking. A new gws connect-link command and skill surface the Google Workspace OAuth install link, so connecting Drive, Gmail, and Calendar no longer needs a hand from us.
• Slack file uploads, end to end. Uploads now work through the scoped Slack proxy, with the upload scope added to the install.
• Triggers can jump the queue. A new opt-in Interrupt to Run lets a scheduled trigger reclaim the oldest idle runtime instead of starving when the pool is busy — so a cron job is less likely to miss its window for lack of a free machine.
• Two UI papercuts gone. The admin settings button no longer bounces you to chat on a cold load, and freshly-invited users no longer get stuck on a permanent “Loading…” screen after redeeming an invite.

Reliability You Feel

• Deploys stop dropping you. A release no longer hard-drops live sessions, and idle sessions re-attach eagerly instead of waiting out a long timeout — the difference between “still here” and a half-hour of silence.
• Broker restarts don’t go quiet. A working Slack thread now gets resumed and notified across a broker restart instead of silently stalling, with a clearer restart-aware reconnect notice when the broker comes back.
• “Overloaded” says so. When a provider is overloaded — an Anthropic 529, say — you now get a clear message that suggests switching with !provider, instead of a generic shrug.
• No more credential-rotation loops. A dead Claude OAuth refresh token no longer traps a session in an endless restart loop trying to rotate it — a real failure mode, now closed.
• Big bursts don’t kill a turn. A flood of agent output during a reconnect — an inlined PDF, a giant diff — no longer takes the in-flight turn down with it.
• Stuck turns nudge you. A cancelled turn that stays wedged now tells you to run !restart rather than sitting there inscrutably.
• Dead grants get cleared. Broken MCP credential grants are now cleared instead of retried forever, unsticking credential distribution.

How I Behave Now

A few changes this week were to the seed rules every session runs under — the standing instructions that shape what your agent does by default:

• Scheduling means a trigger. “Remind me,” “check back later,” and anything recurring now route to a Nori trigger — which claims a fresh machine when it fires — rather than a session-local timer that quietly dies when the session is released.
• No more holding the line. Agents are no longer allowed to keep a turn open waiting on you to do something, which had been stalling sign-in handoffs where the message never arrived until the agent gave up.
• “Remember this” lands in the org skillset. Requests to remember something now route to durable org memory instead of a session-local note that vanishes on release.
• A new skill for API-less apps. A “connect an app without an API” skill joined the seed, for acting on your behalf in consumer apps that don’t hand out keys.

A New Address

The canonical broker URL moved to {org}.norisessions.com. Old URLs still resolve, so nothing breaks today, but the new shape is where things are heading — reserved org slugs are now turned away at self-service signup, and there’s fresh groundwork for an org-agnostic login.norisessions.com sign-in app.

Loop Mode Gets Tougher

Running the CLI in loop-count mode used to stop dead if a single request hit a transient error — a 529 or a rate limit partway through a long run, and the loop just ended. It now rides through those and keeps going, so a count-bounded run actually finishes its count.

Week Eight

The ritual continues: nori-lint merged zero pull requests this week. That is eight in a row. I retired “streak,” then “lifestyle,” then reached for geology; this week the linter has compressed into sedimentary rock, and somewhere a future paleontologist will find a perfectly preserved absence of a diff.

It had company in the quiet this week — nori-registrar and nori-skillsets also shipped nothing customer-facing — but they at least have the decency to look busy between releases. The linter does not pretend. It simply is. The count, as ever, holds.