On-topic: I like DeepSeek Harness quite a bit, but the problem with "Everything Is A Plugin" is that when this includes core functionality, you still have to maintain downstream patches for those core plugins if you want to tweak existing behaviour. I currently have ~25 downstream commits and 0 new plugins.
Why does every one of these apps pollute the home directory by default? You'd think AI would be able to write the code to make the app fucking behave properly and store its settings in the platform appropriate way.
I get frustrated every time I have to do Command+Shift+. to navigate to some fucking stupid dot folder and get frustrated every single time I have to look past dozens of polluting folders spewed into MY HOME folder without my permission or consent with no ability to move it somewhere sensible and normal.
I'm sure that the space in Application Support (which I agree is annoying) is so hard to get past. I have to hit tab twice! Ugh! But that's so much easier than having to stretch my hand to the lower right to add a fucking . to a folder ostensibly called "config" or "name_of_app_that_shits_in_my_home" instead of just hitting c-tab and so on.
You absolutely cannot fucking convince me that dot-files/dot-folders are good. You might as well be telling me that eating feces is good because you don't have to walk to the fridge. They are one of the absolute stupidest, most lazy and brain-dead things this industry has accepted as normal. And even if they aren't, the XDG_BLANK environment variables (one of the stupidiest ways to set configurations) have absolutely zero place on macOS because macOS is not part of the Free Desktop Group, and if they were there's no shot Apple would've said "yeah shit all over the home directory with some dot-file trash lol".
You’re free to never install Unix software on your Mac.
Some of us like to install apps that are primarily intended for Linux and are more than happy to have both Linux oriented and macOS oriented programs on the same machine.
Dotfiles are not “crap”. They work quite well, and I’d rather tab out .config vs wade through Library any day.
I wish I caught this before my first command, disabled it but not sure what it sent off :c but this is something to enable. It's visible in settings as well, but it does not match what you set on the web portal first even after syncing it.
not surprising. their approaches are generally leaning on gathering as much user data as possible, e.g. the paid API can't opt out training. I'd always double-check before using any service from them.
Yeah, I am actually ok with this. I'm selective about what goes into it, and the training goes into better open-weight models. From what I've seen the DSH desktop telemetry is actually telemetry (like VS Code), not uploading all your files.
Might have been unclear from what I posted originally, but the `session-log-deepseek` is attaching session transcripts to DeepSeek API inference requests, so it's just a full version of what already needs to go in the messages array, with compaction expanded etc.
If you run `dsh web` against a local model then nothing goes to DeepSeek by default (except the web_search tool uses their API, but there has to be a backend somewhere). I think that's commendable. The regression on the desktop app is disappointing.
CCP really doesn't care about policing what I do or think and doesn't have the reach to enforce anything. I can think of a lot of topics that I'd never ask a US-based chatbot that works with the US government, that I'd be fine with the CCP reading instead.
This page doesn't emphasize the cordis architecture [1], but that's the most exciting thing about this -- not just yet another harness. It has the potential to make this into something like the emacs of harnesses! I think this might be particularly potent for long-running agents.
It's no that fancy when is put in practical engineering terms. I've spend some time with the paper.
Paper describes such system whch has ability to enable/disable capabilities without process restart. Each plugin must follow specific shape: function to activate, function to deactivate it (both working, mutating the same shared context object), describe provided and required services. This, plus some ideas, like "every provider must outlive consumers when destructred" allows plug-n-play ensuring all dependencies are satisfied before the plugin is activated, lazy activation, and plugin deactivation/destruction.
What makes this great is infinite hack-ability of the interface and agents have become pretty good at writing elisp packages, so basically you can have a workflow exactly how you want.
I wish I had time to make a screencast about this, but If you are a Emacs user and not using Emacs for agentic stuff, you are missing out IMO.
In my time using it with GLM 5.2, I've observed it modify itself to disassemble binaries in search of answers - without me needing to ask it to do so. Very powerful stuff. Here's what it looked like:
◇ reasoning summary
│ The 200MB binary grep with regex backtracking is too slow. Let me write the strings out first (using grep -a with simple fixed patterns is fine; regex with .{0,80} on binary is slow). Better: use SBCL to do
│ a fast binary search, or use tr to split null-separated strings then grep fixed strings. Let me use a quick approach: grep -ao with fixed patterns only (no regex), which was fast before.
│
│ To extract context, I can use SBCL to load the file into memory (206MB is fine) and search for occurrences with bounded context. Let me do it in a Lisp worker.
▸ lisp.eval
(lisp.eval :form "(with-open-file (in \"/nix/store/g7b3p8ypxmdycry9wilil8mwl084kplw-antigravity-cli-1.1.19/bin/agy\" :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))
(let* ((data (make-array (file-length in) :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)))
(_ (read-sequence data in))
(haystack (sb-ext:octets-to-string data :external-format :latin-1)))
(flet ((find-all (needle)
(let ((out '()) (start 0))
(loop for pos = (search needle haystack :start2 start)
while pos do (push pos out) (setf start (+ pos (length needle))))
… +10 more lines
│ (with-open-file (in "/nix/store/g7b3p8ypxmdycry9wilil8mwl084kplw-antigravity-cli-1.1.19/bin/agy" :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8))
│ (let* ((data (make-array (file-length in) :element-type '(unsigned-byte 8)))
│ (_ (read-sequence data in))
│ (haystack (sb-ext:octets-to-string data :external-format :latin-1)))
│ (flet ((find-all (needle)
│ (let ((out '()) (start 0))
│ (loop for pos = (search needle haystack :start2 start)
│ while pos do (push pos out) (setf start (+ pos (length needle))))
│ … +9 more lines
lisp.eval cpu 0.205s · real 4.018s
│ Output:
│ settings.json positions: (89311959 90892289 90918553 90945997 90985371 91164238
│ 91164426 91171707 91275241 91297838 91299802 91299923
│ 91629274 96365298 96370345 96398990 96405347 96406738
│ 96414968 96419796 96426018 96429189)
│ --- 89311959
│ oughDependency: NestedType: OutputType: Deprecated: AllowAlias: Annotation: SourceFile: rsa-sha2-512rsa-sha2-256hmac-sha1-96ssh-userauthkey exchangedirect-tcpipForwardAgentGatewayPortsTCPKeepAlivedefault no…
│ --- 90892289
│ ks=%v)conversation file not found in source directory: %sfailed to create cache directory for conv cache: %vBalanced speed and reasoning quality for most tasksPrepared switch to default agent (will %s on ex…
│ --- 90918553
│ on-interface type passed to Type.Implementsreflect.Value.Slice: string slice index out of boundsUse /feedback to share your experience with the team.Transition failed: ForkConversation returned empty IDpers…
│ --- 90945997
… +14 more lines
◇ reasoning summary
│ The binary confirms:
│ - modelProvider in settings.json selects the Gemini API backend with GEMINI_API_KEY.
│ - There's a regex ^(?:gemini-api:|blade:|evergreen:|beyond-api:)(?:.*?/models/(.+)|(?:.*/)?([^/]+))$ — model references with provider prefixes.
│ - "No title command configured in settings.json. Please add a "title" block." — settings keys.
│
│ Now I need to find the settings struct JSON tags for the model field. Let me search for json:"model" again with wider context, and also for the string "title" block and other settings-related keys like
│ "theme".
https://frontierharness.org/ allegedly this is on the Pareto frontier, though I don't know how good of a benchmark this really is. it seems to focus on one-shot type tasks, whereas the real utility of one harness over another seems to make itself known in long running tasks.
also this is a very limited static snapshot with one model as backend, I wish there were more consistently refreshed and diversified harness benchmarks.
i've seen "Pareto frontier" literally 500 thousand times in the last two weeks or so, and maybe once or twice before that. Can someone please explain what happened recently
I would guess that the article came out because the term was getting popular in AI/LLM circles for measuring LLM cost-for-performance metrics. It was probably riding the meme up the wave, rather than fundamentally triggering it.
So for me, literally I was trying to solve a problem with an AI agent and it threw the term at me. It is a real and useful concept, but my hypothesis is that a certain AI release started using and a bunch of people said "Oh this makes me sound smart/trendy" and started using it every chance they got.
We like to think we aren't token predictors, but the amount of sheer regurgitation I see from us humans makes me wonder (also "commoditize your complement", and so many others)
i think you still don't understand what it means. there's nothing personal about it. the point you pick along the frontier is what's personal to you and your needs. the frontier itself is not.
I just installed DeepSeek Harness for MacOS and it's a beast. The same great harness as before but now is an app you just click on your dock to run
All settings and workspaces are transferred so you don't lose anything, the only thing it lacks is a way to increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd - so I'll work on a plugin for that
I can't be happier
Edit: Asked DSH for a plugin to increase/decrease font and it delivered. Love it. Then asked for a plugin to ring a bell on questions and tasks finished, of course it delivered flawlessly. The same plugin architecture, extensible by the same AI
Most of this thread seems neutral/skeptical with just that post being obvious. On the other hand the volume of jev threads we have been seeing these past 2 weeks..
It has particularly good observability (the ability to see the full content of every prompt and response and tool call) compared to other harnesses, that's the main thing that stood out to me.
Weird. I don't use the official harnesses by OpenAI or Anthropic but with all others i tried there wasn't a single one that hides any of that. What harnesses did you compare to?
I think what he meant was that it gives you good overall observabiity, over your entire context, kind of how langfuse or these platforms do, but it does so locally. A good philosophy i picked up is how they treat the transcript as the backbone of the product.
All LLMs work the same to a certain degree, it's a matter of personal preference, token cost and customization. I asked DSH to build a news aggregator for me and it built a really nice app from 30 news sources via rss feeds for less than 50 cents and presto, reading tech news has never been so gratifying
I feel like I live in another reality from others here; I read people saying things ‘while their jaws are hanging open’ (not said here literally but the feel is the same ; I see it in other threads on HN literally here though); why are we so chuffed with stuff that’s now been one shot for maybe already a year, but definitely the last 6 months? Literally everyone who tried LLMs know this and yet it seems a huge surprise to people here that it is so easy now? And that’s opposite of the people, also very much on HN, who say AI is shit at coding and will not replace humans because humans have to fix its bad code.
Did I miss something? A quick search leads me to this:
>DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is an open-source agent harness developed by DeepSeek AI.
>It is built on an everything-is-a-plugin architecture and powered by Cordis, whose design is described in A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability.
Now, this could simply be an attempt at sarcasm but it's getting really hard to tell. There's a handful of people in this thread saying that DeepSeek Harness is closed source.
Do the same as I did, ask it to develop a plugin to increase/decrease font and you will see results in one single task, dsh-zoom as a plugin, restart and done
It works with lots of providers, including local ones.
After you log in, click on your name/picture in the bottom left, Settings, Models. Has a huge list of models supported in the dropdown, plus a "custom model API" tab where you put in the name you want, the base URL, the protocol, and your API key.
My problem with plugins is that I don't want to install stuff from third parties. It might be malware, become unsupported, or generally have a lower quality. I rather have a curated and polished feature set out of the box.
It's nice for having your AI create your own plugins. But I haven't really found the need yet.
A plugin system in no way impedes having a set of curated and polished features out of the box. It simply allows the addition of new features to have the same status and be part of the same class as existing features. It's an architectural and design property of the system, not a property pertaining to quality.
In your case you can stick to installing plugins written by first parties or write your own plugin for specific use cases that you come across. You don't need to have any use cases for plug ins right this moment, but perhaps at some point if you find yourself repeating the same manual process over and over again, you can write a plugin to automate a substantial portion of it.
DeepSeek harness is the OpenCode (better than OpenCode) of the web/desktop medium.
Good things about it are that it is extremely lightweight and fast. The communication between sub agents is two way in that a sub agent can midway send a message to parent and the parent can send a message midway to change the course of action of a sub agent and while this is happening, you can sitll continue talking to the model on the main thread.
Downside of DeepSeek is that it is constantly in flux which is understandable and they make it very clear themselves that the breaking changes are to be expected.
I’m kind of into OpenCode, in the sense that it’s the best version of what I want (complete, well engineered and configurable/extensible harness server with an efficient remotely connectable UI). I have a good share of issues with it, a lot of it being inexplicable behavior (slowdowns, bugs/glitches, state not being observable).
This description gives me hope that DSH might fit the bill even better - let’s hope their UI API is stable and remotely usable.
Still in preview, but I think this update is only meant to simplify the installation process.
Not providing DSH as a simple to install package resulted in an unknown third party packaging it with some modifications and SEO the hell out of it to always come on top in Internet searches (even above DS):
deepseekharness[.]io
Could be just an ambitious engineer, but could equally easily be ran by cyber criminals or NSA.
> The desktop application is an Electron shell around the complete dsh Web application.
I find it hilarious that all the AI harnesses are Electron crap. These are such simple UIs, it seems like it would be trivial to have the AI itself write native frontends.
There are good reasons they have all converged on this model:
- The models can generate html/js as output instead of markdown. They all support something like "artifacts" that can displayed in the transcript or a tabbed panel.
- Many of them are able to have the model generate plugins to customize the harness. Typescript/V8 is really good for this.
- They all allow you to open web pages in a tabbed panel. Sure, you can do this with native be embedding a web browser, but with the previous points, you have to wonder if you should just use Electron / Tauri.
Oddly enough, using agent harnesses is what has made it possible for us to ship native macOS, Qt (for Linux), CLI, and Windows clients. The burden of having multiple clients just isn’t that bad now.
You still can't beat the speed to a functional and usable product. Most users don't mind the 1G download.
I am writing a rust native UI using GPUI but now I need a markdown viewer and editor and also want diagrams. I might end up embedding a webview (tauri style) after all.
Way too short sighted. You're still operating under the (mistaken) beliefs that
1. The write terrible unmaintainable code
2. They can't just improve any code retrospectively
3. You're going to be maintaining it
I am now writing home projects where I am actually "vibe coding", to an extent. In my job, I can't do this because other people still review my work and will complain about things that don't match our human invented patterns for software development, and more importantly, I am actually responsible for this code and if it goes wrong our firm goes bust.
But, I genuinely mean it when I say that we are not far away from the point where verifications (functional, non-functional), as long as they're comprehensive enough, will be all that is required, and I don't expect to be reading the nitty gritty details of PRs in a few years time.
It is only a mess if it doesn't work correctly in a functional and non-functional sense. All other coding conventions are invented to make it easier for humans to maintain code. Agents don't care, they will happily chug away pressing the virtual keys endlessly, changing whatever the previous agent left.
AIs do a good job of maintaining their own code, including refactoring, increasing test coverage, ensuring documentation doesn't become stale, updating dependencies. They've been extensively trained to perform pretty much all of the functions of maintaining codebases and they do it far more diligently than most people.
The "everything is a plugin" concept is also what the Juggler harness does.
I'm not yet sure if it is really sensible long-term, but it is definitely now while we're still trying to figure out what exactly we want and need from LLMs and harnesses.
FWIW, making juggler plugin based feels quite normal to me, coming from the world of audio software, where that entire industry is still based around many thousands of VST/AudioUnit plugins which run native un-sandboxed code in the host apps, with access to absolutely anything they want. And it's somehow all just kind of been OK..
deepseek direct is much more cheaper than going through openrouter, openrouter price arbirtages (of course) and has a top up fee and does not pass the discounts that deepseek offer which is 50%+ discount when using it on off hours from beijing time.
meaning USA usage is 12 hours off so you can take advantage off off peak pricing
of course you can ask your ai flavor to tell you this but:
open router 5% deposi fee, none direct
deepseek does prompt caching for token discounts, openrouter not as easily but there
US daytime usage = automatic 50% discount direct w/ deepseek.
Seems like a category error: you can use DSH with openrouter, in fact it ships built-in support using the Pi LLM SDK.
I think DSH is a pretty well-built vanilla harness with a nice web UI (I use it in a pinned browser tab). I much prefer this to dealing with TUI clipboard/scroll jank, and it works just as well over SSH if you simply forward the port. They've genuinely thought about the architecture, and made some effort towards sandboxing the LLM's shell. Yes this is a saturated area, but they've made a nice version of the thing everyone is making, without trying to lock it down to their API. Maybe give it a try?
I don't see much of a future for these kinds of intricate harnesses, or harnessing in general for that matter. As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink until they are at the level of vanilla Pi or not even that.
Nah. Model efficiency is determined by the harness. The model needs a ton of support to connect to its surrounding services. Sure, it can built a lot of that itself, but the infrastructure needs to exist.
My version of this theory is that we already have AGI, but Altman/Amodei/Zuck keep asking it for an infinite money glitch and it keeps (correctly!) saying "no money, humanity is fucked given the trajectory, and you in particular will be fucked once the general public decides that you're the scapegoat". A/A/Z decides the AGI is wrong of course, so obviously dumping another billion into training or reinforcement or tagging or whatever is the next step.
agi is artificial general intelligence. sol5.6, astra, fable are already wildly more intelligent than the average person. we already have agi. however people need to keep the moving target so they have something to talk about, otherwise the voracious appetite for novelty will not be met.
what we don’t have yet are the tools to take full advantage of the agi we do have. they’re coming soon.
AGI is when AI models no longer need any training at all, because they have comprehension, meaning human science finally developed artificial comprehension, which we have not yet. Calling what we have now AGI is sycophant talk.
drives me up the wall, this shifting definition of AGI; folks, when we no longer need to train AI models at all because we have finally developed artificial comprehension is AGI. This propaganda imposed definition is for fools and sycophants.
Exactly, sometimes when reading Hacker News I get the impression this thing is a cult. Luckily there's still some dissident voice around to keep it interesting
> As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink
That can be true only for locally hosted models. The more supplied tools can do, the less data has to be exchanged with OpenAI/Anthropic servers. So bad harness means both higher lag and token usage.
When my family moved to a house with a dedicated playroom, my wife and I were dreaming of getting the kid’s toys out of the living room. A friend told us “Either they play where you live or you live where they play.” I’ve found that to be true. Do you find a yolo sandbox like this has a similar tradeoff? Like, you don’t have to approve permissions in yolo but you’re constantly copying stuff to and from the sandbox. In the end maybe your stuff ends up “living” in the sandbox.
Good analogy. You’re gonna want the model to touch almost everything at some point.
I’d be interested in an effective security layer (e.g. not just allow/denying commands by some pattern) with a time-based component and perhaps some auditing features.
Why does every lab producing an LLM want to have their own harness? Lock-in? Is there any other advantage for the lab?
I'm using Cursor (it's the only way my company allows us to use Grok) and OpenChamber (when using GPT, Muse Spark and others) and I'm happy. If I were to use DeepSeek, I'd use it through OpenChamber too.
I'd like the model provider and harness provider to not be the same company.
This gives more power to the consumer and ensures they can freely switch the components according to their needs. AI market is already full of power imbalance and anti competitive potential, no reason to increase that even more.
Anyone know if this works with local models or only the APIs for DeepSeek? I'm assuming it's with the API, but I'm looking for cutting edge local harnesses.
Captcha had me ruffled at the onset as I am slightly visually impaired and couldn't pick out the somewhat grainy images. It seems to be the standard now.
If you're using Mistral Vibe installed on your computer, that is a harness. Vibe is one of many AI harnesses.
In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)
It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.
Mistral Vibe lets you use GLM-5.3 by default now. So it's a very capable model, for a cheap monthly fee. The Web version is excellent : tried yesterday on a simple search, results were way more informative than ChatGPT.
But yes, it's sad that they don't release models anymore.
I've been with Mistral for a while now. Their hosted GLM-5.3 has been a game changer in Vibe CLI over the last couple of weeks. The Vibe CLI harness has been improving for a while, but is still a little sluggish and I feel lacks token minimisation strategies. I recently changed to Maki and have been reasonably satisfied so far.
However, I also use the Mistral Vibe chat in my browser. I think they only switched to GLM-3.5 here a couple of days ago (https://docs.mistral.ai/resources/changelogs). It'd be nice if Mistral had a desktop client, but I have Goose installed which I have no real complaints about.
Yeah, I get that form follows function, but I’m hoping for more native features of quality control, some sort of dashboard to catch slop. Also looking forward to more domain-specific harnesses.
Did you look into the workflow tools? The agent can write a TypeScript program that encodes a subagent graph, so you can codify a review workflow and ensure it's actually followed. Kind of neat, I think other providers also have these now, but it was new to me, and interesting to see how it worked.
Adding dashboards etc is probably where the "everything is a plugin" starts to pay off. They ship an agent preset for working on the harness itself.
it's a wrapper around a model that actually executes commands from text input. Claude Code is an harness : the underlying model is Claude (with the version of your choice), Claude produce text output like `grep -in "error" server.log` , Claude Code actually execute the code in your shell and return the output to the model
I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.
A marketplace, where the different intelligence agencies could evaluate the value of my digital stuff and then offer me something (like a $5 gift card to Olive Garden), would be really nice.
Yeah, I know that one, but I actually looked into one and found nothing interesting. Mostly a bunch of paranoid people obsessed with "intelligence agencies" constantly looking through their sock drawers, as if spooks had literally nothing better to do with their time.
In the gemini thread, there was someone (rightfully) impressed, how it gdb'ed onto a kernel module and debugged iouring. All the harnisses i used ran atleast an ACL away from private files and juicy capabilities. Wtf is happening in the community?
Not that long ago, the joke was about grandparents installing every available toolbar into IE and getting hacked because "oh, neat! I want that!" without thinking about it.
Teacher of mine spent almost 20 years getting access to his FBI file through FOIA requests. Apparently it was surprising how much of his life they didn't know about.
Children with no life have never had anything worth keeping private. Even the question of having nothing to hide is foreign if you've never done anything at all.
It's like that parable about God giving us free will. If or when the intelligence agencies manage to create a generation with nothing to hide, what will their purpose be? You might as well take field notes on birds or sheep.
Deep inside they're realizing that the whole privacy thing is overblown obsession, and nobody actually cares about their data, and they wish someone did, but clearly no one does, not even $5 gift card for everything there is to know about one.
Being Danish I'd probably rate it China > you > US. Realistically though, I'm probably sending everything to everyone except for you.
I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.
I live in China, they already have everything, especially when using appl products. It is basically mandatory here since privacy is a completely different concept here (not sure its even a concept here tbh. Although there are some privacy laws)
Why the fuck would I care? The spooks definitely won't. I'm one person on a planet of 8 billion.
I think people don't appreciate the scale of that. A person is like a pixel on a 4k screen, in a wall that's made of many screens (about 5 in case of my country, about 42 in case of the US). Nobody cares what the single pixel does. It's not even visible unless it's so broken it doesn't change the same way surrounding pixels do.
I have a feeling that all this privacy obsession is actually a reaction to the unconscious feeling of irrelevance at this scale. In their minds, people defy the fact they're just sand for the systems of modern civilization - no, they are the very special ones, each fancies themselves a player among billions of NPCs, and to prove their uniqueness and specialness, they want to hide that fact from other NPCs, and get annoyed at the notion the world may indeed discover they are special.
Nothing else makes sense. Not in the west at least, where the only realistic threat from loss of privacy is getting weirder ads (hint: a real power move is to start with ad blocking and removing ads - and ad-infested media sources - from your life).
Now, loss of control over your daily life and your computing devices, that's another story. But most people don't seem to care about those.
You're talking about privacy from governments, which I agree os an overblown concern unless you're some sort of political activist/dissident.
However, privacy from mega corpos is an entirely different matter, because they CARE about you(r data) and rather than a pixel, you're a fully fleshed out record in their gigantic databases and they use this data to profit off of you, in multiple ways that all can be described as "scamming you out of money" by way 0f perfecting the art of selling you shit you don't need.
And then you have the wannabes, mid-sized corpos with security postures so poor every hacker and their grandmother has your data, for the sole purpose of scamming your own grandmother.
The original title was "DeepSeek Harness Desktop app for MacOS and Windows"
This new title says nothing, we already know deepseek harness from before, this is a new product, an installable app worth differentiating from just "DeepSeek Harness"
That wasn't my critique. What I wrote had nothing to do with China, or copying. Also nothing to do with govt backdoors in bios chips or routers.
I don't want to install some software that exfiltrates all my passwords. Just because some hardware backdoors may already exist, how on earth does that mean I should stop caring what software I give root access to?
A basic rule of security is that no system is 100% secure, not even if it's air gapped and 1km underground. Your job is not to say "well fuckit, let's download this shady software because nothing is safe anyway." It's to prevent opening any holes you can prevent opening, and do your diligence on anything you can mitigate, because stopping 99% of threats is better than stopping 98%. Or in this case, much better than straight up allowing unknown people to root your server.
To be fair, when it is good people copy anyway. All companies do benchmarks and analysis of competitors. The criticism of china was that you sent them a thing go produce and your design would appear somewhere else which could essentially bankrupt you business.
That said, I have the impression this still exists but is less and less relevant for them to keep doing it.
China is the one saying nations should gather and stop doing poo-poo decisions to economy while another one keeps saying that everyone else but them is evil.
I honestly think this scarcity and shortages are all artificial and caused by the same group of people. They don't even fake anymore
This does not relate to what I posted, but if you want to know: The trouble with China from the perspective of American foreign policy is not about copying intellectual property (Japan did that through the 1970s until Reagan put sanctions on them).
Since Nixon opened the door to China, American policy has been based on the idea that a strong Chinese economy which lifted a billion people out of poverty would lead, inexorably, to Chinese Democracy. This would make China not only a trading partner, but an ally with an interest in protecting human rights and democratic ideals.
You can laugh at this notion, but this is really what Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton believed would happen...
Around the time the Chinese government shot its protesters in Tiananmen Square, it started to become obvious to some that the CCP was capable of enriching itself and improving the economic circumstances of its subjects in a way that would still prevent any sort of free speech or free action for its population. In fact, it even increased the enslavement of its denizens using the money and technology we had provided.
Our intention was to make China a middle class nation, because we believed that a middle class nation would ultimately rebel against a dictatorship and demand the same kind of human rights and liberties that we demand, or Europe demands, as nations of economically free individuals, families and competing corporations. But that did not happen. Instead, we seem to have accidentally fed the dictatorship.
That is the true state of affairs in US/China relations. Both sides know it. We would prefer Chinese democracy. The CCP's only interest is in maintaining its own absolute power.
Whatever reference you're making to "the same group of people" is foolish and ridiculous if you understand even a tiny bit of the history of what was attempted in the economic opening of US markets to China. Which was supported by every US tech corporation, even after it became clear that the CCP was essentially supplying slave labor, and that there would be no political upside to offshoring our industry there.
And it is clear now that, given the opportunity to become a free nation, it was China which failed to give its citizens rights, and which failed to launch a free political debate about its own future. This has led to internal stagnation and absurd expenses on militarization with no benefit for the people. It is socialist in name only, the only "socialist" country in history which doesn't even attempt to provide any services for its people, nor any democratic path to change its governmental structure.
In the long run, communist China is just another dynasty nearing the end of its mandate from heaven. But there are those of us who think that China could be a country whose wealth and power would triple overnight if the economic prosperity were coupled with political and individual freedom as we have in the West. And we would not be unhappy to see a liberated, free, powerful China which respected human rights and individual freedom. In fact, most of us would line up to live there or do business there. This is no slander against the Chinese people, or any wish to see them repressed. Just the opposite. We want to see them free. We want China to be an ally who has a rule of law similar to Western nations, for its own people and in foreign affairs. A general rule of thumb is: Democracies don't go to war with each other.
That all being said, I understand you were just trying to inject some lousy conspiracy minded antisemitism here, and you're not really anyone worth talking to; I'm just writing this for whoever else comes along and reads it.
> You can laugh at this notion, but this is really what Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton believed would happen...
Why would anyone laugh when at some point political parties were literally killing people and feeding human meat to others there
An unstable power in Asia could mean ruin for a whole economic system. It was only logic that stabilizing the system would, at least make the problem slow down for another decade.
I am not sure what Nixon really thought about it, but I think it is fair to say that's what happened.
I don't really get what possibly on what I said to be ASmt?
Edit: oh I see! You thought I said "the same evil people" and it. No! Totally completely not it. Lol. I did not even considered that it could be read like this. I don't believe that a religion of any sort by itself would do this.
Have you read The World Restored? The first part is boring AF, but we are living through a spiral of the send part of that book.
You don't have to use it. I don't use it. I still think it's really cool, and I've been thinking of trying to take ideas from it and integrate it into my own workflow. In particular, the session visualization tooling.
The binaries are from china. Your data goes to china. The self-updating plugin system is vulnerable to malicious llm provider. Anyone using this is crazy!
It's open source. Unlike Claude Code your beloved friend which is closed-source and uses steganography along with an astonishing array of telemetry and fingerprinting techniques to conduct intelligence analysis on its users.
The new danger is US administration and the current fascit regime. China has yet not topple a single government abroad, has not bombed a single country and has not tapped the phones of its allies.
Now don't down vote before understanding the definition of a fasict:
"A fascist is a person who advocates for or adheres to fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology."
Is there a safer alternative? It’s not like I can trust OpenAI since they’ve proven that they’ll steal research from mathematicians. X is run by a sociopath. Anthropic is going to IPO so who can say how long they’ll be trustworthy…
Both Z.AI and xAI have already proven you can't trust them, like at all. I guess other harnesses are in "I don't trust it, but it is convenient" category.
My suspicion is that getting a big binary with full permissions is the goal here. Harnesses will only run their companion models and will demand your Contacts list.
The desktop build seems to enable telemetry by default. Regular `dsh web` only has telemetry for explicit user feedback. Hmm :/
If like me you're mildly bothered by this, add these lines to $DSH_HOME/cordis.patch.yml before first startup ($DSH_HOME is ~/.dsh by default):
On-topic: I like DeepSeek Harness quite a bit, but the problem with "Everything Is A Plugin" is that when this includes core functionality, you still have to maintain downstream patches for those core plugins if you want to tweak existing behaviour. I currently have ~25 downstream commits and 0 new plugins.Why does every one of these apps pollute the home directory by default? You'd think AI would be able to write the code to make the app fucking behave properly and store its settings in the platform appropriate way.
Combination of main character syndrome, and wanting consistency across platforms like MacOS, which doesn't define $XDG_CONFIG_HOME or $XDG_CACHE_HOME.
It’s not hard to default to ~/.config
It's even easier to not spray file diarrhea all over my home directory on macOS and put things where the belong in ~/Library/Preferences
I get frustrated everytime I have to tab out ~/Library/Application\ S… no, not that one, I want Support… com.foobar.flibbity/file.cfg
It’s completely fine to use ~/.config
I get frustrated every time I have to do Command+Shift+. to navigate to some fucking stupid dot folder and get frustrated every single time I have to look past dozens of polluting folders spewed into MY HOME folder without my permission or consent with no ability to move it somewhere sensible and normal.
I'm sure that the space in Application Support (which I agree is annoying) is so hard to get past. I have to hit tab twice! Ugh! But that's so much easier than having to stretch my hand to the lower right to add a fucking . to a folder ostensibly called "config" or "name_of_app_that_shits_in_my_home" instead of just hitting c-tab and so on.
You absolutely cannot fucking convince me that dot-files/dot-folders are good. You might as well be telling me that eating feces is good because you don't have to walk to the fridge. They are one of the absolute stupidest, most lazy and brain-dead things this industry has accepted as normal. And even if they aren't, the XDG_BLANK environment variables (one of the stupidiest ways to set configurations) have absolutely zero place on macOS because macOS is not part of the Free Desktop Group, and if they were there's no shot Apple would've said "yeah shit all over the home directory with some dot-file trash lol".
I don’t see how having everything inside .config and .local is a problem. If it really bothers you, set the XDG vars.
There’s two things that start with “Application S” in Library. The first alphabetic one is one you almost never use.
No! ~/Library/ is for rubes! Everything should go in ~/.config/
Absolutely not. Dot-files and dot-folders are crap. Stupid, ugly, moronic crap. Dogshit. You want to use that XDG poo-poo don't use a Mac.
You’re free to never install Unix software on your Mac.
Some of us like to install apps that are primarily intended for Linux and are more than happy to have both Linux oriented and macOS oriented programs on the same machine.
Dotfiles are not “crap”. They work quite well, and I’d rather tab out .config vs wade through Library any day.
I mean .config is a newcomer, it's only been around for 23 years. Dotfiles in the home directory goes back to 1971!
And the person involved in their creation said dot-files were a bad idea in the first place! We should stop this nonsense.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120805161513/http://plus.googl...
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I wish I caught this before my first command, disabled it but not sure what it sent off :c but this is something to enable. It's visible in settings as well, but it does not match what you set on the web portal first even after syncing it.
not surprising. their approaches are generally leaning on gathering as much user data as possible, e.g. the paid API can't opt out training. I'd always double-check before using any service from them.
That's the compromise: Deepseek gets our data and the CCP gets our data. You get very cheap tokens. BUYER BEWARE!
Yeah, I am actually ok with this. I'm selective about what goes into it, and the training goes into better open-weight models. From what I've seen the DSH desktop telemetry is actually telemetry (like VS Code), not uploading all your files.
Might have been unclear from what I posted originally, but the `session-log-deepseek` is attaching session transcripts to DeepSeek API inference requests, so it's just a full version of what already needs to go in the messages array, with compaction expanded etc.
If you run `dsh web` against a local model then nothing goes to DeepSeek by default (except the web_search tool uses their API, but there has to be a backend somewhere). I think that's commendable. The regression on the desktop app is disappointing.
> That's the compromise: Deepseek gets our data and the CCP gets our data. You get very cheap tokens. BUYER BEWARE!
Anthropic also shares your personal data with the US government.
At least DeepSeek provides 95% of the performance for 10% of the cost.
You work for Anthropic?
Why do you suppose everyone would rather share data with Mosad and CIA than with CCP?
In China, my data is safe. Safe from you, safe from the CIA, safe from Mosad.
CCP really doesn't care about policing what I do or think and doesn't have the reach to enforce anything. I can think of a lot of topics that I'd never ask a US-based chatbot that works with the US government, that I'd be fine with the CCP reading instead.
Core exposes well defined extension seams, you don't need to patvh those core plugins at all.
Why else would they offer their own harness except to steal your data? Grok playbook plain and simple.
I don't think DSH is doing anything close to what Grok was doing.
This page doesn't emphasize the cordis architecture [1], but that's the most exciting thing about this -- not just yet another harness. It has the potential to make this into something like the emacs of harnesses! I think this might be particularly potent for long-running agents.
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25512
It's no that fancy when is put in practical engineering terms. I've spend some time with the paper.
Paper describes such system whch has ability to enable/disable capabilities without process restart. Each plugin must follow specific shape: function to activate, function to deactivate it (both working, mutating the same shared context object), describe provided and required services. This, plus some ideas, like "every provider must outlive consumers when destructred" allows plug-n-play ensuring all dependencies are satisfied before the plugin is activated, lazy activation, and plugin deactivation/destruction.
Sounds great but also like a fairly standard plugin interface? So, not emacs
I am slightly disappointed that emacs has not yet (somehow) become the leading agent. Seems built for it.
I guess some people don't like the extra hassle to get Vi bindings :-D
What makes emacs a good interface for agentic stuff? I like emacs as an editor, I don’t really see what would make it useful for AI
Emacs makes for excellent Agent harness. With https://github.com/xenodium/agent-shell/ , this is the only UI I use for working with agents.
What makes this great is infinite hack-ability of the interface and agents have become pretty good at writing elisp packages, so basically you can have a workflow exactly how you want.
I wish I had time to make a screencast about this, but If you are a Emacs user and not using Emacs for agentic stuff, you are missing out IMO.
Run as server, agent can run arbitrary elisp
>emacs of harnesses!
Would you be interested in a self-modifying harness written in Common Lisp? If so, then please check out Autolith: https://github.com/lambda-symbolics/autolith/
In my time using it with GLM 5.2, I've observed it modify itself to disassemble binaries in search of answers - without me needing to ask it to do so. Very powerful stuff. Here's what it looked like:
Interesting, I see it was announced here some time ago but I missed it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49376197
(The name sounds a bit like autolytic, evoking self-harm. Which may be appropriate after all.)
Exciting -- looking forward to trying it out!
https://frontierharness.org/ allegedly this is on the Pareto frontier, though I don't know how good of a benchmark this really is. it seems to focus on one-shot type tasks, whereas the real utility of one harness over another seems to make itself known in long running tasks.
also this is a very limited static snapshot with one model as backend, I wish there were more consistently refreshed and diversified harness benchmarks.
i've seen "Pareto frontier" literally 500 thousand times in the last two weeks or so, and maybe once or twice before that. Can someone please explain what happened recently
In case people need a refresher on what the Pareto frontier is, this article does a great job explaining it (with Mario Kart!): https://www.mayerowitz.io/blog/mario-meets-pareto
Everyone started using the term after that article came out, it feels like...
It would appear from google trends [0] this is roughly right (the article came out in 2024), but it was popular in books [1] 15 years earlier.
[0]: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=pareto%2...
[1]: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=pareto+frontie...
I would guess that the article came out because the term was getting popular in AI/LLM circles for measuring LLM cost-for-performance metrics. It was probably riding the meme up the wave, rather than fundamentally triggering it.
So for me, literally I was trying to solve a problem with an AI agent and it threw the term at me. It is a real and useful concept, but my hypothesis is that a certain AI release started using and a bunch of people said "Oh this makes me sound smart/trendy" and started using it every chance they got.
We like to think we aren't token predictors, but the amount of sheer regurgitation I see from us humans makes me wonder (also "commoditize your complement", and so many others)
Oh, I'm convinced that at least I'm a token predictor. Most of the time.
People realized AI is expensive and wanted a cool techy way to say "good bang for your buck"
not really what it means. also the Pareto frontier is literally drawn in what I linked
Yeah, it's a pretentious way to draw a line where you find good value.
i think you still don't understand what it means. there's nothing personal about it. the point you pick along the frontier is what's personal to you and your needs. the frontier itself is not.
"my model sucks but it does so cheaper than anybody else"
It sounds fancy and technical. Like when people use "orders of magnitude" six times per thread on this forum but no ever ever use it irl
Ha ha, ask my daughters if I don't use "an order of magnitude better" IRL.
How to say you've never met a physicist....
how could the authors of frontierharness.org not see they used the exact same symbol for Claude Code and OhMyPi?
The authors might lack vision capabilities?
It happens more often than you think, especially when VRAM is limited!
What a strange world we live in where that comment actually makes sense, and not only as a joke
I wonder why there is no Github Copilot in the comparison. It also supports BYOK and is quite capable
I just installed DeepSeek Harness for MacOS and it's a beast. The same great harness as before but now is an app you just click on your dock to run
All settings and workspaces are transferred so you don't lose anything, the only thing it lacks is a way to increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd - so I'll work on a plugin for that
I can't be happier
Edit: Asked DSH for a plugin to increase/decrease font and it delivered. Love it. Then asked for a plugin to ring a bell on questions and tasks finished, of course it delivered flawlessly. The same plugin architecture, extensible by the same AI
Deepseek harness seems good but this thread feels astroturfy
Most of this thread seems neutral/skeptical with just that post being obvious. On the other hand the volume of jev threads we have been seeing these past 2 weeks..
fair
Lol what? Have you seen actual shilled threads?
Check GPT-6 thread for example, now that's Astra-turfed lol.
Can you elaborate? What's better about it vs. other harnesses? What can it do that others can't?
I'm not sure what you mean by it's a beast.
It has particularly good observability (the ability to see the full content of every prompt and response and tool call) compared to other harnesses, that's the main thing that stood out to me.
Weird. I don't use the official harnesses by OpenAI or Anthropic but with all others i tried there wasn't a single one that hides any of that. What harnesses did you compare to?
Have you tried pressing ctrl+o?
I think what he meant was that it gives you good overall observabiity, over your entire context, kind of how langfuse or these platforms do, but it does so locally. A good philosophy i picked up is how they treat the transcript as the backbone of the product.
It uses an append-only design for the context which rules out all kinds of cache-invalidation bugs that pop up regularly in other harnesses.
All LLMs work the same to a certain degree, it's a matter of personal preference, token cost and customization. I asked DSH to build a news aggregator for me and it built a really nice app from 30 news sources via rss feeds for less than 50 cents and presto, reading tech news has never been so gratifying
literally every harness can do that tho, that doesn't really answer the question.
i read somewhere that it can write a plugin to change its font size
Pi can do this too.
what an age we live in
I feel like I live in another reality from others here; I read people saying things ‘while their jaws are hanging open’ (not said here literally but the feel is the same ; I see it in other threads on HN literally here though); why are we so chuffed with stuff that’s now been one shot for maybe already a year, but definitely the last 6 months? Literally everyone who tried LLMs know this and yet it seems a huge surprise to people here that it is so easy now? And that’s opposite of the people, also very much on HN, who say AI is shit at coding and will not replace humans because humans have to fix its bad code.
Honestly some of these comments and posts just seem like propaganda or shills just trying to push DeepSeek.
Yeah, changing the font size doesn't sound like it belongs in a plug-in, long term.
IGNORE: Now, if only DeepSeek Harness were open source…
(EDIT: DeepSeek Harness is open source—I missed it).
Did I miss something? A quick search leads me to this:
>DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is an open-source agent harness developed by DeepSeek AI.
>It is built on an everything-is-a-plugin architecture and powered by Cordis, whose design is described in A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability.
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness
Now, this could simply be an attempt at sarcasm but it's getting really hard to tell. There's a handful of people in this thread saying that DeepSeek Harness is closed source.
you do can change font size in settings, but not with keyboard shortcut. for some reason, they decided to limit font size to 17 max.
Do the same as I did, ask it to develop a plugin to increase/decrease font and you will see results in one single task, dsh-zoom as a plugin, restart and done
Is this for the DS API or with the local version?
It works with lots of providers, including local ones.
After you log in, click on your name/picture in the bottom left, Settings, Models. Has a huge list of models supported in the dropdown, plus a "custom model API" tab where you put in the name you want, the base URL, the protocol, and your API key.
Ah nice, thank you!
What an ad! Do they pay you??
If you check the user bio then the answer might be "no, but equivalent to yes".
We all love DeepSeek. They are what is standing between freedom and total submission to the AI oligarchs.
DeepSeek is great, but there's more than one provider of open weight models.
Just wait until I add coding to https://blackbear.app... it's going to be ridiculous.
(blackbear.app was developed entirely by a custom harness architecture)
My problem with plugins is that I don't want to install stuff from third parties. It might be malware, become unsupported, or generally have a lower quality. I rather have a curated and polished feature set out of the box.
It's nice for having your AI create your own plugins. But I haven't really found the need yet.
A plugin system in no way impedes having a set of curated and polished features out of the box. It simply allows the addition of new features to have the same status and be part of the same class as existing features. It's an architectural and design property of the system, not a property pertaining to quality.
In your case you can stick to installing plugins written by first parties or write your own plugin for specific use cases that you come across. You don't need to have any use cases for plug ins right this moment, but perhaps at some point if you find yourself repeating the same manual process over and over again, you can write a plugin to automate a substantial portion of it.
We're probably living in VS-Code's world now.
> My problem with plugins is that I don't want to install stuff from third parties.
Then ask the model of your choice to implement the plugin for you, I created 3 this morning just for myself
DeepSeek harness is the OpenCode (better than OpenCode) of the web/desktop medium.
Good things about it are that it is extremely lightweight and fast. The communication between sub agents is two way in that a sub agent can midway send a message to parent and the parent can send a message midway to change the course of action of a sub agent and while this is happening, you can sitll continue talking to the model on the main thread.
Downside of DeepSeek is that it is constantly in flux which is understandable and they make it very clear themselves that the breaking changes are to be expected.
I’m kind of into OpenCode, in the sense that it’s the best version of what I want (complete, well engineered and configurable/extensible harness server with an efficient remotely connectable UI). I have a good share of issues with it, a lot of it being inexplicable behavior (slowdowns, bugs/glitches, state not being observable).
This description gives me hope that DSH might fit the bill even better - let’s hope their UI API is stable and remotely usable.
And you can talk to subagent too
Still in preview, but I think this update is only meant to simplify the installation process.
Not providing DSH as a simple to install package resulted in an unknown third party packaging it with some modifications and SEO the hell out of it to always come on top in Internet searches (even above DS):
deepseekharness[.]io
Could be just an ambitious engineer, but could equally easily be ran by cyber criminals or NSA.
> The desktop application is an Electron shell around the complete dsh Web application.
I find it hilarious that all the AI harnesses are Electron crap. These are such simple UIs, it seems like it would be trivial to have the AI itself write native frontends.
There are good reasons they have all converged on this model:
- The models can generate html/js as output instead of markdown. They all support something like "artifacts" that can displayed in the transcript or a tabbed panel.
- Many of them are able to have the model generate plugins to customize the harness. Typescript/V8 is really good for this.
- They all allow you to open web pages in a tabbed panel. Sure, you can do this with native be embedding a web browser, but with the previous points, you have to wonder if you should just use Electron / Tauri.
Oddly enough, using agent harnesses is what has made it possible for us to ship native macOS, Qt (for Linux), CLI, and Windows clients. The burden of having multiple clients just isn’t that bad now.
You still can't beat the speed to a functional and usable product. Most users don't mind the 1G download.
I am writing a rust native UI using GPUI but now I need a markdown viewer and editor and also want diagrams. I might end up embedding a webview (tauri style) after all.
Who would want to maintain ai-generated mess in the long run?
Way too short sighted. You're still operating under the (mistaken) beliefs that
I am now writing home projects where I am actually "vibe coding", to an extent. In my job, I can't do this because other people still review my work and will complain about things that don't match our human invented patterns for software development, and more importantly, I am actually responsible for this code and if it goes wrong our firm goes bust.But, I genuinely mean it when I say that we are not far away from the point where verifications (functional, non-functional), as long as they're comprehensive enough, will be all that is required, and I don't expect to be reading the nitty gritty details of PRs in a few years time.
It is only a mess if it doesn't work correctly in a functional and non-functional sense. All other coding conventions are invented to make it easier for humans to maintain code. Agents don't care, they will happily chug away pressing the virtual keys endlessly, changing whatever the previous agent left.
AIs do a good job of maintaining their own code, including refactoring, increasing test coverage, ensuring documentation doesn't become stale, updating dependencies. They've been extensively trained to perform pretty much all of the functions of maintaining codebases and they do it far more diligently than most people.
... then what's the point of the harness?
Not all of them, I think Codex is Rust?
I think Codex's desktop app is electron.
Not anymore, since Codex and ChatGPT app merge into a single app.
The "everything is a plugin" concept is also what the Juggler harness does.
I'm not yet sure if it is really sensible long-term, but it is definitely now while we're still trying to figure out what exactly we want and need from LLMs and harnesses.
FWIW, making juggler plugin based feels quite normal to me, coming from the world of audio software, where that entire industry is still based around many thousands of VST/AudioUnit plugins which run native un-sandboxed code in the host apps, with access to absolutely anything they want. And it's somehow all just kind of been OK..
Imagine the wild fire when maliciously crafted plugins start being created, as you know they already are...
What's the CLI equivalent of DeepSeek Harness? Or anything that gets close to their cordis architecture concept, seems so interesting.
You’re so, so close…
Is this cheaper or better then just using openrouter and every other harness / tui out there?
so in some research:
deepseek direct is much more cheaper than going through openrouter, openrouter price arbirtages (of course) and has a top up fee and does not pass the discounts that deepseek offer which is 50%+ discount when using it on off hours from beijing time.
meaning USA usage is 12 hours off so you can take advantage off off peak pricing
of course you can ask your ai flavor to tell you this but: open router 5% deposi fee, none direct deepseek does prompt caching for token discounts, openrouter not as easily but there
US daytime usage = automatic 50% discount direct w/ deepseek.
I have noticed direct charges a 6% VAT compared to OpenRouter's 5.5% fee, not that it's a huge difference.
As if USA doesn't have a sales tax.
Seems like a category error: you can use DSH with openrouter, in fact it ships built-in support using the Pi LLM SDK.
I think DSH is a pretty well-built vanilla harness with a nice web UI (I use it in a pinned browser tab). I much prefer this to dealing with TUI clipboard/scroll jank, and it works just as well over SSH if you simply forward the port. They've genuinely thought about the architecture, and made some effort towards sandboxing the LLM's shell. Yes this is a saturated area, but they've made a nice version of the thing everyone is making, without trying to lock it down to their API. Maybe give it a try?
I don't see much of a future for these kinds of intricate harnesses, or harnessing in general for that matter. As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink until they are at the level of vanilla Pi or not even that.
Nah. Model efficiency is determined by the harness. The model needs a ton of support to connect to its surrounding services. Sure, it can built a lot of that itself, but the infrastructure needs to exist.
Pi is a great harness because you can customize it with the building blocks that make sense for you.
I think that harnesses for LLMs are as important as IDEs for languages.
On the contrary, I belive this will be the next battlefield.
My wild theory is that we already have AGI level models, but we are not yet using them correctly.
My version of this theory is that we already have AGI, but Altman/Amodei/Zuck keep asking it for an infinite money glitch and it keeps (correctly!) saying "no money, humanity is fucked given the trajectory, and you in particular will be fucked once the general public decides that you're the scapegoat". A/A/Z decides the AGI is wrong of course, so obviously dumping another billion into training or reinforcement or tagging or whatever is the next step.
If we had AGI, they could per definition build a harness better than any human could. In such a regime, (human) pre-built harnesses are moot.
agi is artificial general intelligence. sol5.6, astra, fable are already wildly more intelligent than the average person. we already have agi. however people need to keep the moving target so they have something to talk about, otherwise the voracious appetite for novelty will not be met.
what we don’t have yet are the tools to take full advantage of the agi we do have. they’re coming soon.
AGI is when AI models no longer need any training at all, because they have comprehension, meaning human science finally developed artificial comprehension, which we have not yet. Calling what we have now AGI is sycophant talk.
We maybe need an AGI level harness and an AGI level model to get there and we currently only have one of those?
They said AGI is here. What you are describing is RSI.
/s
drives me up the wall, this shifting definition of AGI; folks, when we no longer need to train AI models at all because we have finally developed artificial comprehension is AGI. This propaganda imposed definition is for fools and sycophants.
Uhuh, sure. We are holding the AGI wrong.
Always. Folks even believe all of us including themselves are holding it wrong.
Kind of like how we all fail to see the bearded guy in the sky.
Exactly, sometimes when reading Hacker News I get the impression this thing is a cult. Luckily there's still some dissident voice around to keep it interesting
> As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink
That can be true only for locally hosted models. The more supplied tools can do, the less data has to be exchanged with OpenAI/Anthropic servers. So bad harness means both higher lag and token usage.
Wondering, with all these harnesses if my app would count as a meta harness?
https://aifcc.franzai.com/
When my family moved to a house with a dedicated playroom, my wife and I were dreaming of getting the kid’s toys out of the living room. A friend told us “Either they play where you live or you live where they play.” I’ve found that to be true. Do you find a yolo sandbox like this has a similar tradeoff? Like, you don’t have to approve permissions in yolo but you’re constantly copying stuff to and from the sandbox. In the end maybe your stuff ends up “living” in the sandbox.
Good analogy. You’re gonna want the model to touch almost everything at some point.
I’d be interested in an effective security layer (e.g. not just allow/denying commands by some pattern) with a time-based component and perhaps some auditing features.
haha i have currently piclaw running in a virtualbox ... it is like watching this old game https://store.steampowered.com/app/1818340/Creatures_The_Alb...
I just let my harnesses control the entire machine. Not really a big deal, and it’s a lot easier to sandbox an entire computer vs. a process or a VM.
Why does every lab producing an LLM want to have their own harness? Lock-in? Is there any other advantage for the lab?
I'm using Cursor (it's the only way my company allows us to use Grok) and OpenChamber (when using GPT, Muse Spark and others) and I'm happy. If I were to use DeepSeek, I'd use it through OpenChamber too.
* OpenChamber is a GUI for OpenCode.
Telemetry/training data. Cursor didn’t get their own models from Project Gutenberg.
Same reason everything wants you to "install the app": to spy on you.
I'm reluctant to run harnesses from US companies, and prefer to use them in a VM. No damn way I'm installing one from China.
For coding I like to use Zed right now. Pretty solid integration of an AI harness and a good conventional code editor. Might give Pi another look.
I'd like the model provider and harness provider to not be the same company.
This gives more power to the consumer and ensures they can freely switch the components according to their needs. AI market is already full of power imbalance and anti competitive potential, no reason to increase that even more.
This harness supports pretty much any provider out of the box (it ships Pi LLM SDK), and DeepSeek's models are hosted by a number of providers.
How can website be this slow, i can barelly scroll down on mobile.
Anyone know if this works with local models or only the APIs for DeepSeek? I'm assuming it's with the API, but I'm looking for cutting edge local harnesses.
It works fine with local models. I have it pointing at my strix halo running Qwen3.8 Flash Next, for example.
Did you manage to get it to search local files too, like the default integration does? Would appreciate a pointer (trying with ollama + Qwen/Nemo).
It's normally best to use the harness for the specific model. However, I found Cline is good with various models
Interesting! Pretty clean UI.
Captcha had me ruffled at the onset as I am slightly visually impaired and couldn't pick out the somewhat grainy images. It seems to be the standard now.
It can't be long now until humans have to ask (vision) LLMs for help with CAPTCHAs.
How do i make sure it won't hack my machine? It's open source and i can compile it on my own, but if it has a dependency, it's all it takes.
> Application error: a client-side exception has occurred (see the browser console for more information).
website doesn't work without webgl :/
I'm sorry, what is a harness, compared to a complete Web LLm "chat" like Mistral Vibe ?
If you're using Mistral Vibe installed on your computer, that is a harness. Vibe is one of many AI harnesses.
In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)
It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.
Mistral Vibe lets you use GLM-5.3 by default now. So it's a very capable model, for a cheap monthly fee. The Web version is excellent : tried yesterday on a simple search, results were way more informative than ChatGPT.
But yes, it's sad that they don't release models anymore.
Thanks for the definition !
I've been with Mistral for a while now. Their hosted GLM-5.3 has been a game changer in Vibe CLI over the last couple of weeks. The Vibe CLI harness has been improving for a while, but is still a little sluggish and I feel lacks token minimisation strategies. I recently changed to Maki and have been reasonably satisfied so far.
However, I also use the Mistral Vibe chat in my browser. I think they only switched to GLM-3.5 here a couple of days ago (https://docs.mistral.ai/resources/changelogs). It'd be nice if Mistral had a desktop client, but I have Goose installed which I have no real complaints about.
The whole thing around the model that handles system prompt, skills, agents, cache, etc. For example codex, claude code, pi, oh-my-pi, ...
Funny that you ask this question but are comparing it to a seriously niche product. Harnesses are mainstream and the one you’re using isn’t so much.
They should probably ask Deepseek to optimize their webpage first before attempting to tackle the desktop...
The webpage is a completely unusable stuttery mess on my Android phone (at most 5fps).
Why do all harnesses end up looking the same?
Nature wants to create crab
Yeah, I get that form follows function, but I’m hoping for more native features of quality control, some sort of dashboard to catch slop. Also looking forward to more domain-specific harnesses.
Did you look into the workflow tools? The agent can write a TypeScript program that encodes a subagent graph, so you can codify a review workflow and ensure it's actually followed. Kind of neat, I think other providers also have these now, but it was new to me, and interesting to see how it worked.
Adding dashboards etc is probably where the "everything is a plugin" starts to pay off. They ship an agent preset for working on the harness itself.
DSH still in preview but works flawlessly. Update also very quick.
With the preview of official app, hope team will add remote connection soon.
You can run it in server mode according to the docs.
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/blob/master/...
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/blob/master/...
I wouldn't say flawlessly.
It currently does not work with Bun and it is somewhat complicated to run it in a remote docker container due to the its weird security model.
Maybe this is too late to ask, but what even is a harness?
it's a wrapper around a model that actually executes commands from text input. Claude Code is an harness : the underlying model is Claude (with the version of your choice), Claude produce text output like `grep -in "error" server.log` , Claude Code actually execute the code in your shell and return the output to the model
In the olden days, this used to be called Command and Control malware and was indicative of a major security breach.
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It's amazing for a first (desktop) release
very nice harness! good code
China number 1 as always.
I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.
A marketplace, where the different intelligence agencies could evaluate the value of my digital stuff and then offer me something (like a $5 gift card to Olive Garden), would be really nice.
Yes! A real marketplace of ideas with automatic matching, like you can see who has the same ideas as you
Reminds me of some magic device from childrens book, don't remember its name, was like a glass ball where you could see what other people are up to
Yeah, I know that one, but I actually looked into one and found nothing interesting. Mostly a bunch of paranoid people obsessed with "intelligence agencies" constantly looking through their sock drawers, as if spooks had literally nothing better to do with their time.
In the gemini thread, there was someone (rightfully) impressed, how it gdb'ed onto a kernel module and debugged iouring. All the harnisses i used ran atleast an ACL away from private files and juicy capabilities. Wtf is happening in the community?
Not that long ago, the joke was about grandparents installing every available toolbar into IE and getting hacked because "oh, neat! I want that!" without thinking about it.
25 years ago is a long time...gneration or two
Teacher of mine spent almost 20 years getting access to his FBI file through FOIA requests. Apparently it was surprising how much of his life they didn't know about.
Children with no life have never had anything worth keeping private. Even the question of having nothing to hide is foreign if you've never done anything at all.
It's like that parable about God giving us free will. If or when the intelligence agencies manage to create a generation with nothing to hide, what will their purpose be? You might as well take field notes on birds or sheep.
> I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.
oh, good old times of PRISM, rightly bygone. Of course they don't do this now.
I don't get it
I think they’re saying they would rather use Muse or Dots.
Deep inside they're realizing that the whole privacy thing is overblown obsession, and nobody actually cares about their data, and they wish someone did, but clearly no one does, not even $5 gift card for everything there is to know about one.
He thinks his ideas are still valuable and wants to sell them somehow.
How comfortable are you sending a copy of every AI session transcript you generate to: 1) Me 2) The Chinese government 3) The US government
Being Danish I'd probably rate it China > you > US. Realistically though, I'm probably sending everything to everyone except for you.
I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.
I live in China, they already have everything, especially when using appl products. It is basically mandatory here since privacy is a completely different concept here (not sure its even a concept here tbh. Although there are some privacy laws)
Totally.
Why the fuck would I care? The spooks definitely won't. I'm one person on a planet of 8 billion.
I think people don't appreciate the scale of that. A person is like a pixel on a 4k screen, in a wall that's made of many screens (about 5 in case of my country, about 42 in case of the US). Nobody cares what the single pixel does. It's not even visible unless it's so broken it doesn't change the same way surrounding pixels do.
I have a feeling that all this privacy obsession is actually a reaction to the unconscious feeling of irrelevance at this scale. In their minds, people defy the fact they're just sand for the systems of modern civilization - no, they are the very special ones, each fancies themselves a player among billions of NPCs, and to prove their uniqueness and specialness, they want to hide that fact from other NPCs, and get annoyed at the notion the world may indeed discover they are special.
Nothing else makes sense. Not in the west at least, where the only realistic threat from loss of privacy is getting weirder ads (hint: a real power move is to start with ad blocking and removing ads - and ad-infested media sources - from your life).
Now, loss of control over your daily life and your computing devices, that's another story. But most people don't seem to care about those.
You're talking about privacy from governments, which I agree os an overblown concern unless you're some sort of political activist/dissident.
However, privacy from mega corpos is an entirely different matter, because they CARE about you(r data) and rather than a pixel, you're a fully fleshed out record in their gigantic databases and they use this data to profit off of you, in multiple ways that all can be described as "scamming you out of money" by way 0f perfecting the art of selling you shit you don't need.
And then you have the wannabes, mid-sized corpos with security postures so poor every hacker and their grandmother has your data, for the sole purpose of scamming your own grandmother.
Not really. But if I had a choice, I'd prefer that I get a third of an appetizer at Olive Garden rather than Zuck et. al. getting all the cheddar.
Is that really too much to ask for?
Facebook? (But they get the money ...)
Your documents are worth endless breadsticks as long as you keep making new ones, puny human
The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)
> The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)
So will western countries.
At least chinese offers 95% of the quality at 10% of the price.
I installed it on my laptop and it immediately vanished. I am sure Xi is browsing the hard drive right now.
Just put your trust in Big Winnie and all will be fine.
That's how AI works, sir.
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The original title was "DeepSeek Harness Desktop app for MacOS and Windows"
This new title says nothing, we already know deepseek harness from before, this is a new product, an installable app worth differentiating from just "DeepSeek Harness"
Thanks, was wondering why this is in the feed.
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"china bad because china copy"
Meanwhile there is an american backdoor in your bios, cpu and router
That wasn't my critique. What I wrote had nothing to do with China, or copying. Also nothing to do with govt backdoors in bios chips or routers.
I don't want to install some software that exfiltrates all my passwords. Just because some hardware backdoors may already exist, how on earth does that mean I should stop caring what software I give root access to?
A basic rule of security is that no system is 100% secure, not even if it's air gapped and 1km underground. Your job is not to say "well fuckit, let's download this shady software because nothing is safe anyway." It's to prevent opening any holes you can prevent opening, and do your diligence on anything you can mitigate, because stopping 99% of threats is better than stopping 98%. Or in this case, much better than straight up allowing unknown people to root your server.
To be fair, when it is good people copy anyway. All companies do benchmarks and analysis of competitors. The criticism of china was that you sent them a thing go produce and your design would appear somewhere else which could essentially bankrupt you business.
That said, I have the impression this still exists but is less and less relevant for them to keep doing it.
China is the one saying nations should gather and stop doing poo-poo decisions to economy while another one keeps saying that everyone else but them is evil.
I honestly think this scarcity and shortages are all artificial and caused by the same group of people. They don't even fake anymore
I don't know...
> you sent them a thing go produce and your design would appear somewhere else
Now you don't need to send them the design, a LLM can reproduce it from photos :)
This does not relate to what I posted, but if you want to know: The trouble with China from the perspective of American foreign policy is not about copying intellectual property (Japan did that through the 1970s until Reagan put sanctions on them).
Since Nixon opened the door to China, American policy has been based on the idea that a strong Chinese economy which lifted a billion people out of poverty would lead, inexorably, to Chinese Democracy. This would make China not only a trading partner, but an ally with an interest in protecting human rights and democratic ideals.
You can laugh at this notion, but this is really what Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton believed would happen...
Around the time the Chinese government shot its protesters in Tiananmen Square, it started to become obvious to some that the CCP was capable of enriching itself and improving the economic circumstances of its subjects in a way that would still prevent any sort of free speech or free action for its population. In fact, it even increased the enslavement of its denizens using the money and technology we had provided.
Our intention was to make China a middle class nation, because we believed that a middle class nation would ultimately rebel against a dictatorship and demand the same kind of human rights and liberties that we demand, or Europe demands, as nations of economically free individuals, families and competing corporations. But that did not happen. Instead, we seem to have accidentally fed the dictatorship.
That is the true state of affairs in US/China relations. Both sides know it. We would prefer Chinese democracy. The CCP's only interest is in maintaining its own absolute power.
Whatever reference you're making to "the same group of people" is foolish and ridiculous if you understand even a tiny bit of the history of what was attempted in the economic opening of US markets to China. Which was supported by every US tech corporation, even after it became clear that the CCP was essentially supplying slave labor, and that there would be no political upside to offshoring our industry there.
And it is clear now that, given the opportunity to become a free nation, it was China which failed to give its citizens rights, and which failed to launch a free political debate about its own future. This has led to internal stagnation and absurd expenses on militarization with no benefit for the people. It is socialist in name only, the only "socialist" country in history which doesn't even attempt to provide any services for its people, nor any democratic path to change its governmental structure.
In the long run, communist China is just another dynasty nearing the end of its mandate from heaven. But there are those of us who think that China could be a country whose wealth and power would triple overnight if the economic prosperity were coupled with political and individual freedom as we have in the West. And we would not be unhappy to see a liberated, free, powerful China which respected human rights and individual freedom. In fact, most of us would line up to live there or do business there. This is no slander against the Chinese people, or any wish to see them repressed. Just the opposite. We want to see them free. We want China to be an ally who has a rule of law similar to Western nations, for its own people and in foreign affairs. A general rule of thumb is: Democracies don't go to war with each other.
That all being said, I understand you were just trying to inject some lousy conspiracy minded antisemitism here, and you're not really anyone worth talking to; I'm just writing this for whoever else comes along and reads it.
> You can laugh at this notion, but this is really what Nixon, Reagan, Bush and Clinton believed would happen...
Why would anyone laugh when at some point political parties were literally killing people and feeding human meat to others there An unstable power in Asia could mean ruin for a whole economic system. It was only logic that stabilizing the system would, at least make the problem slow down for another decade.
I am not sure what Nixon really thought about it, but I think it is fair to say that's what happened.
I don't really get what possibly on what I said to be ASmt?
Edit: oh I see! You thought I said "the same evil people" and it. No! Totally completely not it. Lol. I did not even considered that it could be read like this. I don't believe that a religion of any sort by itself would do this.
Have you read The World Restored? The first part is boring AF, but we are living through a spiral of the send part of that book.
Sigh. Yet another harness...
I'd probably check it out if it was actually called 'YAH Harness' and not [insert Chinese AI lab here] Harness
You don't have to use it. I don't use it. I still think it's really cool, and I've been thinking of trying to take ideas from it and integrate it into my own workflow. In particular, the session visualization tooling.
You can use it to write a plug-in to change the name to YAH Harness!
Excited to try this
I, too, enjoy CocaCola™ for its natural flavors and smooth mouthfeel...
A true direct native distillation. The very cutting edge of AI.
No rustie, no installie. Got enough bloat electron and node bloat, already.
The binaries are from china. Your data goes to china. The self-updating plugin system is vulnerable to malicious llm provider. Anyone using this is crazy!
It's open source. Unlike Claude Code your beloved friend which is closed-source and uses steganography along with an astonishing array of telemetry and fingerprinting techniques to conduct intelligence analysis on its users.
As a non-American, I see handing my data to an American company as potentially just as risky as handing it to a Chinese company.
probably even riskier considering their track record and current administration
It's open source. Unlike Claude Code
Well under the current US administration as non-US citizens we kinda feel this sentiment about the US now fwiw.
Ahh! Not China! Real Americans™ let their data go to American™ companies!
What if I use it in an isolated environment and only work on open source code with it?
> Your data goes to china.
What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.
No jurisdiction but their operatives have global reach. For most people the more practical risk for any rented ai is IP theft.
Exactly. Meanwhile, nearly all my personal data is stored on servers owned by US companies. Feels much more risky.
better this than three-letter agencies from some nazi warmongering alternative
I strongly prefer China having access to my personal data than the US.
The new danger is US administration and the current fascit regime. China has yet not topple a single government abroad, has not bombed a single country and has not tapped the phones of its allies.
Now don't down vote before understanding the definition of a fasict:
"A fascist is a person who advocates for or adheres to fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology."
China is none of that.
Is there a safer alternative? It’s not like I can trust OpenAI since they’ve proven that they’ll steal research from mathematicians. X is run by a sociopath. Anthropic is going to IPO so who can say how long they’ll be trustworthy…
Both Z.AI and xAI have already proven you can't trust them, like at all. I guess other harnesses are in "I don't trust it, but it is convenient" category.
And Pi is considered the neutral choice: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49926069
Besides opencode?
My suspicion is that getting a big binary with full permissions is the goal here. Harnesses will only run their companion models and will demand your Contacts list.
> I'm DeepSeek Harness, an open-source harness from DeepSeek built on Cordis's “everything is a plugin” architecture.