dsh-anchored-standard

中文说明

Experimental DeepSeek Harness agent presets — a base mode, two live-anchor variants, and one seeded prefab mode — that anchor a session's model trajectory on the Minimal condition (real Minimal tool schema, no auto-injected context), then promote to a small resident catalog once the session is durable, unlocking heavier Standard tools on demand.

This is a community project. It is not an official DeepSeek preset and is not affiliated with or endorsed by DeepSeek.

Feel free to submit feedback on the plugin in the form of Issues or PRs. For ideas for new plugins or useful findings, please submit them under the repository.

Project status (2026-08-17)

Following the price increases on both the DeepSeek official API and the opencode go subscription, active development of this project has effectively stopped: the evaluation loops these presets depend on (Project2-class runs and multi-trial roll/probe experiments) are no longer affordable. The repository stays available as-is and receives maintenance only (bug fixes and harness-compatibility updates when feasible). The mechanism findings, the dose-response data, and the tooling (context-gate, the prefab pipeline, the probe suite) remain valid and are largely model-agnostic. A personal note from the maintainer: FAREWELL.md (Chinese). Contributors and collaborators are listed in ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md.

Community projects that users report perform better in some scenarios:

• dsh-routing-suite — a runtime injector plus task-aware thinking-mode routing presets (the router-standard family).
• J-Space Cognition Suite — a model-agnostic inference-time cognitive control layer packaged as a Skill.

Modes at a glance

Mode	Directory	First model request	Anchor mechanism	Promotion signal	Cost
Anchored Standard	preset/	2 tools (the Minimal pair)	Minimal tool schema	first durable tool/call or assistant/message (promoteOn: either)	none
Zero-Anchored Standard	zero-anchored-standard/	0 tools	one fixed anchor turn	the anchor reply (assistant/message)	+1 model call
Whoami Standard	whoami-standard/	0 tools	one "你是谁" self-introduction turn	the self-introduction reply (assistant/message)	+1 model call
Prefab Anchored Standard	prefab/	seeded rolled history	bundled successful trajectory	already promoted in the seed	no model call to instantiate
Eternal Minimal	eternal-minimal/	2 tools, forever	the visible catalog never grows; heavier tools run via the dshx bash gateway	none (no phases)	none
Wire Think-Execute Standard	wire-think-standard/	tools present, tool_choice: none on the wire	sibling provider route per think step	per-turn: the steer itself	+1 model call/turn, prefix-cache churn
Combo Anchored	combo-anchored/	0 tools, on every user turn	think/execute split + depth gate + deliberation drip as three independent rows	per-mechanism	+1 model call/turn

Every mode directory is self-contained and installs alone under whatever id you copy it to (see Install). The prefab hydrates the blank session in place when its preset is selected; no per-workspace import is required.

Terminology

• trajectory — the style of the model's first reasoning chain. The Minimal condition produces "We need…" first lines; the Standard condition produces "Let me…" ("standard-like") first lines.
• anchor — the first-request conditions that select the trajectory. Issue #11 isolated three levers: the tool schema, the output budget, and the injected reminders.
• bootstrap phase — request #1 of a session: the bootstrap tool pair, no auto-injected context, optional output cap.
• promotion — the durable session event that ends the bootstrap phase. Base mode: first tool/call or assistant/message, whichever comes first. Variants: the anchor reply.
• durable — recorded in the session event log. Phase state is derived from durable events, so resume and reload preserve it.
• resident catalog — the promoted tool set: the bootstrap pair plus the discovery tools plus every tool the model explicitly unlocked.
• discovery tools — dev_tool_search, skill_search, skill_load: the on-demand unlock surface for heavier Standard tools.
• materialized copy — the committed copy of a shared/ plugin inside a mode directory, generated by npm run sync.

How it works

The base mode in one request lifecycle (the variants change only the first turn — see their sections):

user's first message
        │
        ▼
┌ request #1 ─ bootstrap phase ──────────────────────────────┐
│ tools    : bash + str_replace_editor (Minimal's real pair) │
│ context  : no AGENTS.md digest, no skill-catalog reminder  │
│ budget   : adapter default (`bootstrapMaxTokens` optional) │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
        │ first durable tool/call OR assistant/message
        ▼ PROMOTION — derived from durable events, resume-safe
┌ request #2+ ─ resident phase ──────────────────────────────┐
│ tools    : bootstrap pair + discovery tools + unlocked     │
│ context  : standard injections restored                    │
│ budget   : adapter default (a cap is stripped on promote)  │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Three first-request levers decide the trajectory (issue #11):

1. Tool schema — the decisive variable at the adapter-default maxTokens (256000). The real Minimal pair anchored 5/5; every standard-family schema fell standard-like 11/11.
2. Output budget — a 1024 first-request cap also anchored the trajectory (26/32), independent of the tool descriptions. The base mode leaves this lever unset (bootstrapMaxTokens is opt-in).
3. Injected reminders — the AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md digest and the available-skills reminder. With the skill catalog present, the anchor did not reproduce at all (0/9). The base mode now suppresses EVERY automatic injection during bootstrap at the harness's two unified injection paths (the context-gate plugin), not just the two measured ones.

Why

DeepSeek V4 Pro conditions strongly on the API-visible tool catalog. In the Project2 evaluation, Standard and PTC produced scores of 91 and 92, while the official Minimal preset produced 99 and 96. Permanently staying on Minimal, however, gives up the Standard preset's broader tool set.

Anchored Standard separates initial trajectory selection from later tool use:

1. Keep the complete Minimal system prompt.
2. Expose the Minimal preset's REAL tool schemas — persistent bash + str_replace_editor, byte-identical to the official Minimal composition — on the first model request (lever 1 above).
3. Suppress EVERY auto-injected context on that first request — at the harness's unified injection paths, not per source name (the context-gate row, mounted FIRST; lever 3). While the session is unpromoted the assembly's dynamic runtime-context contributions are blanked (the whole SystemPrompt.context() family: sandbox/approval policy snapshots and any third-party context provider), and the pre-step waterfall keeps only the CLAIMED message batch plus a small kind allowlist (a user-initiated skill gesture survives; skill catalog, AGENTS.md digest, time/tmux context, hooks, and unknown third-party injections are stripped by default). After promotion the gate opens and the loop's own snapshot projection diffs exactly ONE fresh runtime-context message into the next request — minimal first round, injections on the second round. A compaction/end boundary re-closes the gate the same way.
4. After the session records its first durable promotion signal — a tool/call or the first assistant/message, whichever comes first — promote to the RESIDENT catalog: the bootstrap pair plus the discovery tools plus whatever the model has explicitly unlocked via dev_tool_search. Dumping the full Standard catalog at promotion pulled the trajectory back to standard-like behavior (the post-promotion regression), so heavier tools — web_search, subagent, workflow, … — stay one dev_tool_search call away. Request #1 always sees the bootstrap catalog; request #2 always sees the resident catalog, so a text-only first reply can no longer trap the session in bootstrap. (promoteOn in the tool-bootstrap row selects the trigger: either default, tool-call, or assistant-message.)
5. Derive the phase from durable session events so resume and reload preserve it.

The bootstrap catalog is the same on every platform: the Minimal pair (bash/str_replace_editor). The preset's shell is the persistent PTY bash (the sandboxed Standard bash row is disabled — both register the bash name into the same layer, and the tools registry rejects duplicates; Windows never had the sandboxed bash anyway). pwsh remains available in the promoted catalog on Windows.

Results

The anchored family was validated on Project2 with three V4 Pro scores of 98, 99, and 99. Provenance note (issue #60): those three runs predate the current composition — they used the Minimal system prompt with a first-request pwsh + read surface and promoted to the full 25-tool Standard catalog; the exact Minimal pair (persistent bash + str_replace_editor) with the small resident catalog was introduced afterward. The bundled generic prefab removes Project2-specific warm-up facts and was not re-benchmarked before the API price change, so those scores must not be attributed to the generic template.

Independent replications: the trajectory anchoring reproduces strongly, but the ability gap is unresolved at small n — see #65 (anchoring 9/9 separated by preset; anchored−standard +3.3, 95% CI [−2.6, +9.3]) and #51 (multi-env, Ability 85–90, 98/99 not reproduced). Treat the scores above as our original observations, not a settled effect size.

Research write-ups live in the companion exploration repository DeepseekCotexplorations (data and methodology; this repository keeps the code):

• Tool-surface dose-response + Project2 replication — methodology, per-run scope, tool-surface experiments, and limitations.
• Anchor-mass quantification + single-request probe methodology — the prefab template quality model and the post-price-hike low-cost evaluation loop.

Development-process records (what was done, why, and the pitfall lists) are kept in this repository as HANDOFF.md and HANDOFF-2.md.

Configuration reference

All knobs are rows in each mode's agent.cordis.yml. Unknown keys fail at preset mount.

context-gate (mounted FIRST in preset/, zero-anchored-standard/, and whoami-standard/ — waterfall registration order makes the gate the outermost transform; the plugin lives in shared/context-gate.mjs and is reusable by any other composition that wants unified injection control alone):

Key	Default	Meaning
promoteOn	either	Promotion trigger: either, tool-call, or assistant-message (the variants use assistant-message).
includeSubagents	false	Gate subagents too (true in the base mode and whoami; keep in sync with the bootstrap row).
enabled	true	false disables both interception paths (A/B testing without touching the row set).
allowKinds	[skill-invocation]	source.kind values allowed beyond the claimed batch; [] keeps ONLY the claimed batch.

Injection control division of labor: session-phase suppression (everything keyed on a promotion boundary) belongs to context-gate. Two documented exceptions keep their own enumerated suppressedContextSources strip because the gate's phase machine does not map onto their scope: the think-step strip in think-phase/wire-think (per-step, not per-session-phase) and the permanent every-request strip in eternal-minimal (no promotion boundary; frozen to the configuration its recorded measurements were taken under).

tool-bootstrap (in preset/agent.cordis.yml; mount right after context-gate):

Key	Default	Meaning
bootstrapTools	[bash, str_replace_editor]	Tools visible on request #1.
promoteOn	either	Promotion trigger: either, tool-call, or assistant-message.
bootstrapMaxTokens	unset	Optional output cap for request #1; stripped after promotion.
includeSubagents	false	Subagents take the bootstrap phase too (true in the base mode).
compactionTools	[]	Extra tools available between a compaction boundary and re-promotion.

zero-tool-bootstrap (in zero-anchored-standard/ and whoami-standard/): compactionTools has the same semantics (promotion is always the first assistant/message), plus includeSubagents, whether subagents also take the anchor phase (set true in whoami-standard, false in zero-anchored-standard). Context suppression is NOT here — both variants mount the context-gate row (above) with promoteOn: assistant-message; the bootstrap's former suppressedContextSources key now fails at mount.

anchor-turn (in both variants): text — the synthetic first user message (default "This round is a test. Tools are not open yet; all tools will open next round." in zero-anchored, "你是谁" in whoami); includeSubagents — whether subagents also take the anchor turn.

eternal-minimal (in eternal-minimal/; the row must stay FIRST):

Key	Default	Meaning
guide	true	Append the short dshx capability guide to the system prompt; false keeps the persona byte-pure.
gateway	true	Intercept dshx shell commands and execute the real tools; false leaves the bare Minimal pair.
gatewayCommand	dshx	The interception word.
maxGatewayChars	12000	Cap on one gateway result payload.
suppressedContextSources	[agent-instructions, skill-catalog]	Stripped on every request (no promotion boundary; the enum intentionally stays — see the division-of-labor note above).

cot-drip (in combo-anchored/):

Key	Default	Meaning
every	4	Attach one deliberation beat after every Nth tool result; 0 disables the drip.
maxPerTurn	1	Beats per turn.
text	built-in beat	The reminder text (one "We …" sentence restating the remaining goal).
includeSubagents	false	Whether subagent calls are dripped too.

toolchoice-adapter (in wire-think-standard/; the row must stay the first LOCAL row):

Key	Default	Meaning
provider	deepseek-wire-think	The sibling route id the adapter owns; registering an id twice throws DUPLICATE_ADAPTER (caught, degraded).
toolChoice	none	The wire tool_choice sent whenever tool definitions are present.
baseURL / apiKeyEnv	settings/env	Row config first, then the llm-deepseek settings section, then DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL / DEEPSEEK_API_KEY.
logprobs	false	Opt-in research hook: request token logprobs and log a per-request mean summary (no StreamChunk surface exists).

wire-think (in wire-think-standard/): same mode / suppressedContextSources / includeSubagents / steerText semantics as think-phase, plus provider (must match the toolchoice-adapter row's id) and defaultProvider (the route execute steps restore onto, default deepseek-official).

instruction-hint (all modes): promoteOn matching the mode's promotion semantics (either in the base mode, assistant-message in the variants) — the one-shot "instruction files exist, read them before acting" hint waits for promotion.

Repository layout

preset/                  Anchored Standard — the base mode
zero-anchored-standard/  variant: fixed zero-tool anchor turn
whoami-standard/         variant: "你是谁" anchor turn, subagents inherit
eternal-minimal/         variant: Minimal pair forever + dshx bash gateway
wire-think-standard/     variant: wire-level condition (tools + tool_choice=none)
combo-anchored/          combination package: think split + gate + drip rows
shared/                  single source of truth for plugins used by 2+ modes
scripts/sync-modes.mjs   materializes shared/ plugins into every mode dir
test/                    zero-dependency test suite (npm test)
verify/                  one-shot headless verification runner
prefab/                  Prefab Anchored Standard + bundled session template

prefab/ ships a generic template by default and a Project2-specific template as an explicit opt-in. Both contain real model reasoning; read the mode's installation notes before use.

Invariants, enforced by npm run check:

• Every mode directory is self-contained: installable by copying it alone; agent.cordis.yml rows may reference only ./local.mjs files, never ../.
• Plugins shared by several modes live once in shared/; the copies in mode directories are generated. Edit shared/, run npm run sync, commit both — never edit a materialized copy.
• The context-gate row stays the FIRST row of preset/agent.cordis.yml (the gate must register before every injecting plugin), with tool-bootstrap right after it. The same first-row rule holds for the context-gate row in zero-anchored-standard/ and whoami-standard/.

This repository deliberately ships no AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md: the presets' whole mechanism is a clean request #1, stripping exactly those instruction-file digests from it (issue #6: 0/9 anchored with the injection present). Shipping one would only feed later rounds and contradict the mechanism being documented. Everything an assistant needs is in this README.

Compatibility

Developed and tested against:

• DeepSeek Harness 0.1.0-rc.5
• repository commit 47f9438
• Node.js 24 on Windows

The persistent shell resolves shellPath adaptively: it keeps the terminal-bash plugin default /bin/bash on hosts where that absolute path exists, and falls back to bash (PATH lookup) otherwise — e.g. NixOS, where bash lives under the Nix store. Hosts that ship /bin/bash keep the previous behavior exactly; the fallback only activates where the default would make every bash call fail with "PTY shell exited during startup".

On the 0.1.0-rc.5 source checkout, bootstrapMaxTokens reaches the actual first request (the first request/header records the cap, adapterDefaults stays empty), because llm.prepareCall only materializes a default maxTokens when the proposed config has none. One prebuilt profile package observed in issue #11 (CLI launcher reporting 0.1.0-rc.6) overwrote the proposed cap with adapterDefaults.maxTokens; there the cap is a no-op. The default composition therefore relies on the Minimal tool schema alone (which anchors at the adapter default with no cap) and leaves bootstrapMaxTokens as an opt-in for standard-schema bootstraps.

DeepSeek Harness is currently a developer preview and explicitly permits breaking changes. This preset is a full snapshot of the Standard composition, so review upstream changes before using it with a newer release.

Install

For the prefab mode, the recommended path is AI-assisted one-command setup. Give your coding agent this repository and ask it to follow the installation-agent contract. When it reports INSTALL READY, start DSH, select Prefab Anchored Standard, create a new session in the target workspace, and send the real task prompt. This installs the generic template; the Project2 benchmark template requires an explicit --template project2 selection and installs under a separate preset id.

Clone this repository, then copy the entire preset directory into the user preset root under the id anchored-standard. Every mode directory in this repository is self-contained: the zero-anchored-standard/, whoami-standard/, prefab/, eternal-minimal/, wire-think-standard/, and combo-anchored/ variants install the same way, alone or together, with no other directory required (see their sections below). prefab/ automatically hydrates newly selected sessions; follow prefab/README.md.

PowerShell:

$target = Join-Path $env:USERPROFILE '.dsh\.agent-presets\anchored-standard'
if (Test-Path -LiteralPath $target) { throw "Preset already exists: $target" }
New-Item -ItemType Directory -Force -Path (Split-Path -Parent $target) | Out-Null
Copy-Item -Recurse -LiteralPath '.\preset' -Destination $target

Linux/macOS:

dsh_home="${DSH_HOME:-$HOME/.dsh}"
mkdir -p "$dsh_home/.agent-presets"
test ! -e "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/anchored-standard"
cp -R preset "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/anchored-standard"

Fully restart DeepSeek Harness, create a blank session, and select Anchored Standard (experimental). Do not switch an active session from a different preset.

Verify

Export the session JSONL and inspect request/header events. Reproduction checklist (issue #11 asks for the first two explicitly, because both are the variables that decide the anchor):

• First-request config.maxTokens value: with bootstrapMaxTokens unset (the default), the first header records the adapter default (e.g. 256000 with adapterDefaults.maxTokens: true); with a cap configured it records the cap (e.g. 1024 with no maxTokens adapterDefault).
• First-request tool schema source: the first header's tools array must be exactly ["bash", "str_replace_editor"] — the official Minimal preset's real schemas, not Standard's pwsh/read.
• the first request's messages should contain no AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md digest and no available-skills reminder — only the user message and the minimal persona system prompt;
• after the first tool call or the first assistant reply, the next changed header should contain the promoted resident catalog: the bootstrap pair plus dev_tool_search/skill_search/skill_load plus any tools the model already unlocked;
• subsequent requests should keep that resident set (it grows only through explicit dev_tool_search unlocks) and restore the standard context injections.

Run the local zero-dependency tests with:

npm test

Important behavior

• With the default promoteOn: either, the session promotes after its first durable tool/call OR its first assistant/message, whichever comes first — request #1 sees the bootstrap catalog and every later request sees the resident catalog. A text-only first reply therefore still promotes at request #2; set promoteOn: tool-call to restore the original behavior, where a first response that makes no tool call never promotes.
• A failed tool execution still promotes the session because the durable tool/call already exists.
• The first request's output budget is NOT capped by default: the Minimal tool schema anchors at the adapter-default maxTokens, so bootstrapMaxTokens is opt-in. When set, the first request is capped and the cap is explicitly stripped after promotion (the next request's seed proposal carries the previous header's maxTokens forward).
• The promoted catalog is the RESIDENT set — the bootstrap pair plus the discovery tools plus everything the model unlocked via dev_tool_search — not the full Standard dump. The Standard sandboxed bash row stays disabled in favor of the persistent shell (same tool name, same layer; see Why). When unlocked, the read/write/edit tools keep the sandboxed filesystem while str_replace_editor uses the preset's local fs.
• A missing bootstrap tool degrades to the full catalog with a one-time warning instead of failing requests, so a composition drift cannot brick a session; invalid promoteOn values fail at preset mount instead.
• Promotion decisions are memoized per session for the process lifetime; the durable event scan runs once per session per process.
• While a session is unpromoted, the context-gate plugin closes BOTH unified injection paths: the assembly's runtime-context contributions are blanked (the whole SystemPrompt.context() family, without enumerating sources), and the pre-step waterfall keeps only the claimed batch plus the allowKinds entries. At promotion the loop's snapshot projection diffs in exactly ONE fresh runtime-context message; a gate failure degrades to keeping every message rather than eating context.
• The tool catalog changes at promotion and again whenever dev_tool_search unlocks a new tool; request-prefix cache continuity breaks at those points.
• The preset has the same trust level as shell access. Review its files before installation.
• The plugin performs no network requests and adds no telemetry.

Zero-Anchored Standard (experimental)

An extra test mode that does not change the Anchored Standard logic above. It uses the same Minimal-aligned system prompt, but instead of exposing two tools on the first request it injects one fixed zero-tool anchor turn:

1. When the user sends their first message, the anchor-turn plugin prepends a fixed user message — "This round is a test. Tools are not open yet; all tools will open next round." — ahead of it.
2. The first real model request carries ZERO tools, so the session's first reasoning chain follows the zero-injection "we" trajectory.
3. Once that anchor response is durable, the resident catalog is exposed and the real message proceeds with it.

Anchoring on the first message — not on session creation — keeps the blank-session preset switcher usable. Subagents always see the resident catalog.

Measured behavior (opencode-go, DeepSeek V4 Pro, reasoningEffort=max): the anchor request is stable "we"-style with zero let me; the following tool-bearing requests return to the "The user wants…/Let me" style. This mode is a comparison point for whether the zero-tool first turn is worth the extra model call — not a claim that tool rounds stay "we"-style.

Install as a separate preset id:

dsh_home="${DSH_HOME:-$HOME/.dsh}"
mkdir -p "$dsh_home/.agent-presets"
test ! -e "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/zero-anchored-standard"
cp -R zero-anchored-standard "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/zero-anchored-standard"

Restart DeepSeek Harness, create a blank session, select Zero-Anchored Standard (experimental), then send your first message.

Whoami Standard (experimental)

A usability-oriented variant of the zero-tool anchor idea: the first turn is a natural self-introduction prompt instead of a fixed test message, and the user's real first message is deferred to the next turn. Whatever the user types first, the session warms up exactly one round and everything is ready when the real message is processed:

1. When the user sends their first message, the anchor-turn plugin prepends a fixed user message — "你是谁" (who are you) — ahead of it in the next-turn inbox queue.
2. dsh claims exactly ONE next-turn message per turn, so the first model request sees only the anchor on an EMPTY tool surface and replies with a self-introduction; that reply is the promotion signal.
3. The real message is claimed by the NEXT turn, with the promoted resident catalog (shells, str_replace_editor, the discovery tools) already unlocked — heavier Standard tools are one dev_tool_search away.

The anchor text is configurable via the anchor-turn row's text option (default "你是谁"). Anchoring on the first message — not session creation — keeps the blank-session preset switcher usable.

Full-powered subagents

Whoami Standard ships with includeSubagents: true on both the zero-tool-bootstrap and anchor-turn rows, so subagents spawned from a session inherit the same anchor flow as top-level sessions:

1. A newly spawned subagent's first model request sees only the "你是谁" anchor on an empty tool catalog.
2. The subagent's self-introduction reply is the promotion signal.
3. The delegated prompt runs on the next turn with the promoted resident catalog (shells, str_replace_editor, and the discovery tools).

Set includeSubagents: false on both rows to restore the plain behavior, where subagents start with the resident catalog immediately. Each subagent costs one extra model call for its anchor turn — a delegation-heavy session pays it per subagent.

zero-anchored-standard keeps subagents plain by default; enabling the same flow there means setting includeSubagents: true on its zero-tool-bootstrap and anchor-turn rows (its anchor text stays the fixed test notice).

The trade-off of the mode itself is one extra model call per session: the anchor turn is always taken, even when the first message is urgent.

The directory is self-contained; install it alone or alongside any other mode.

Install as a separate preset id:

dsh_home="${DSH_HOME:-$HOME/.dsh}"
mkdir -p "$dsh_home/.agent-presets"
test ! -e "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/whoami-standard"
cp -R whoami-standard "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/whoami-standard"

Restart DeepSeek Harness, create a blank session, select Whoami Standard (experimental), then send your first message — the self-introduction round runs first, and your message is answered with the full tooling on the next turn.

Eternal Minimal (experimental)

The "make the model believe it never left Minimal" mode: the model-visible catalog stays EXACTLY the Minimal pair (bash + str_replace_editor) for the WHOLE session — no anchor round, no promotion, no discovery tools, no catalog growth — while the full Standard toolset stays registered and executes FOR REAL behind the dshx bash gateway:

dshx list                           # list every gateway tool
dshx web_search '{"query": "..."}'  # execute the real web_search
dshx read_image '{"path": "..."}'   # execute the real read_image

1. Eternal pair: system-prompt/assemble keeps only the shells + str_replace_editor on every request (think steps, post-compaction, subagents — everything), and auto-injected context is stripped everywhere (there is no promotion boundary to key suppression on).
2. Gateway: a tools/pre-execute listener intercepts bash commands starting with dshx, dispatches them through ctx.tools.execute() (the full registry pipeline — policy, guards, execution, rendering), and returns the rendered output as the command result. The deny channel is the only sanctioned pre-dispatch way to substitute a result, so gateway payloads arrive flagged as errors — every payload states plainly that the tool executed and its output follows, so the model reads it as output. The real tool really ran: the user sees genuine effects (files, searches, subagents) exactly as if it had been called by name.
3. Guide: a short dshx capability guide is appended to the system prompt (guide: false for a byte-pure Minimal persona) so the model knows the gateway exists without a third visible tool.

The gateway refuses to dispatch the shells/str_replace_editor themselves ("invoke them directly"), which also makes recursion impossible. Unknown tools, malformed JSON, and tool failures all come back as readable payloads. Set gateway: false for a bare two-tool session with no interception.

Install as a separate preset id:

dsh_home="${DSH_HOME:-$HOME/.dsh}"
mkdir -p "$dsh_home/.agent-presets"
test ! -e "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/eternal-minimal"
cp -R eternal-minimal "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/eternal-minimal"

Restart DeepSeek Harness, create a blank session, select Eternal Minimal (experimental), then work as usual — the model composes shell commands, and dshx … lines run the heavier Standard tools for real.

Wire Think-Execute Standard (experimental)

The wire-level mode: every user turn opens with one think step that keeps tool definitions PRESENT in the request while the wire forbids invocation (tool_choice: "none"), then a steering notice opens the execute phase on the official provider with the resident catalog.

tool_choice is outside the harness GenerateOptions vocabulary (the official deepseek adapter documents the mapping as an MVP cut), so reaching this condition takes the sanctioned wire seam:

1. Sibling route: toolchoice-adapter.mjs (row 1) registers a zero-dependency DeepSeek chat-completions adapter under its OWN provider id (deepseek-wire-think) that puts tool_choice: "none" on the wire whenever tool definitions are present. The official DeepSeekAdapter cannot be wrapped (its wire body is built inside a private generator), so this file vendors a minimal, protocol-faithful subset of the official serialize/SSE/translate pipeline — the same assistant-message nuances (content: "" never null, reasoning_content replayed only on tool-call turns, tool results as role: "tool" with an (no output) fallback) and the same usage/finish translation. Connection facts resolve row config > llm-deepseek settings section > env, exactly like the official row, so the same DEEPSEEK_API_KEY serves both routes.
2. Per-step routing: wire-think.mjs keeps the think step's assembled catalog UNTOUCHED (that is the condition being reproduced) and swaps ONLY the provider in the agent/request waterfall — the frozen loop-built request and the log-reconstructability invariant are preserved. Execute steps (and every subagent) are routed back to the captured original provider even when the folded session header seeds them with the think route.
3. Steer + resident: agent/turn-stopping steers exactly once per turn (resume-safe from durable steering/message events), and execute steps see the promoted RESIDENT set.

Degradation ladder: if the sibling route is not registered (row removed, or a second preset already mounted the same id — DUPLICATE_ADAPTER is caught and warned), think steps fall back to the zero-tool condition, so a composition mistake can never brick a session. mode: first-turn limits the routing (and its costs) to the session's first user turn.

Costs to know before adopting: the think/execute alternation switches the tools block of the request prefix twice per turn, so DeepSeek prefix-cache reuse breaks from the first changed token each switch (provider id itself is invisible to the backend cache; the tools block is what diverges). Each swap appends a request/header change event. Set logprobs: true on the adapter row for the opt-in research hook — the adapter requests token logprobs and logs a per-request mean summary (the harness StreamChunk vocabulary has no surface for logprob data, so logging is all a plugin can do today; that log stream is exactly what offline trajectory analysis would consume).

Install as a separate preset id:

dsh_home="${DSH_HOME:-$HOME/.dsh}"
mkdir -p "$dsh_home/.agent-presets"
test ! -e "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/wire-think-standard"
cp -R wire-think-standard "$dsh_home/.agent-presets/wire-think-standard"

Combo Anchored (experimental) — the combination package

The everything-is-a-plugin showcase: THREE orthogonal anchoring mechanisms composed as independent rows, each with its own knobs, each removable or retunable by editing one line of agent.cordis.yml. They attack the pre-tool deliberation collapse at different moments of a turn:

Row	Mechanism	Owns
think-phase	zero-tool think step + steering notice	the turn OPENING
deliberation-gate	depth gate denies the first tool call of a shallow turn	the FIRST ACTION
cot-drip	one "We …" beat after every Nth tool result (tools/post-execute additionalContexts — never blocking, never erroring)	the LONG MIDDLE

With mode: every-turn the think step opens every turn, the gate catches the paths that skip it (steering continuations, resumed sessions, straight-to-tools follow-ups), and the drip sustains deliberation across long tool loops. Defaults are deliberately gentle (minChars: 400, every: 4, one beat per turn); tune per workload. Swapping the think-phase row for wire-think + toolchoice-adapter upgrades the opening to the wire-level condition (see above) at the cost of the sibling route and its prefix-cache churn.

Explored and rejected for this package: pure Code Mode presentation (presentAs('code') collapses the catalog into one run_code tool) — a single-tool surface measurably underperforms the two-tool condition in the sibling project's evaluations; and text-only fake tools or ghost tool-call histories — both proved unreliable anchors in practice.

Official ecosystem guidance

DeepSeek currently asks community plugin authors to publish plugins in their own GitHub projects and add the dsh-plugin repository topic for discovery. The official repository does not currently accept external pull requests and does not mandate a community repository template. See the official CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT. preset/agent.cordis.yml is derived from the DeepSeek Harness Standard preset; the original DeepSeek copyright and MIT notice are retained in NOTICE.