DeepSeek Harness — dsh — launched on August 13, 2026, and did something no coding agent had done before: it made everything a plugin. The model provider, the sandbox, the tool set, session storage, the Web UI, and even the agent loop itself are all swappable plugins running on the Cordis composable runtime. The repository passed 179,000 GitHub stars in its first week, and the community dsh-plugin topic passed 6,000 repositories in that same week.
That scale is both the promise and the problem. Nobody can usefully browse thousands of repositories — and unlike an app store, none of it is curated or reviewed by DeepSeek. This guide is our answer: the plugins actually worth a slot in your profile, where the ecosystem organizes itself, and how to vet anything before you install it. Our picks are curated from the two most-maintained awesome lists (awesome-deepseek-harness and awesome-dsh-plugin) and the dsh-plugin topic, with descriptions summarized from each project’s own README as of late August 2026 — we have not audited any plugin’s code, so treat the vetting baseline below as part of this guide, not a footnote.
What is DeepSeek Harness, in 60 seconds
dsh is DeepSeek’s open-source agent harness (MIT license, currently in developer preview — expect compatibility-breaking changes). It runs a local-first Web UI and a headless mode from a single command:
npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web # starts the Web UI at http://127.0.0.1:3080Plugins declare a dsh.bundle manifest and install into a named profile:
dsh plugin --profile web add <plugin-name>Plugin sources can be npm packages, GitHub repositories, tarballs, or local directories. Because a plugin runs its code on your machine with your permissions, source review before installing is not optional — more on that in Vetting plugins.
We track dsh as a full directory entry with ratings and comparisons — see DeepSeek Harness and how it stacks up against Claude Code, OpenCode, and Cursor.
Where the ecosystem organizes itself
Before the curated picks: you do not need to crawl GitHub yourself. The ecosystem has already built its own maps, and the honest answer is that for raw discovery, these are more complete than any article can be:
- DSH Get — bilingual searchable directory indexing 2,400+ plugins with categories, install commands, and source attribution.
- dsh-suite — living directory (785+ plugins, refreshed hourly) with daily compatibility CI and an in-app store.
- awesome-dsh-plugin and awesome-deepseek-harness — the two most-maintained curated lists.
- In-app stores — dsh-plugin-workshop and dsh-plugins-store put a Steam-Workshop-style browser inside the Web UI itself.
What those catalogs don’t give you is an opinion. That’s the gap this guide fills — every recommendation below is a judgment call, not a listing.
The curated picks
Workbench & UI
If you live in the dsh Web UI all day, these turn it from a chat window into a workspace.
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-spotlight | Keyboard-first command palette — the fastest navigation upgrade available. |
| dsh-plugin-workbench | VS Code-style file tree, syntax-highlighted preview, and right-click file operations. |
| harness-workbench-plugin | The full-IDE variant: multi-tab editing, workspace terminal, and complete SCM (stage/commit/push/pull, branch switching, git graph, inline diffs). |
| dsh-hud | Floating HUD for Git status, MCP servers, active model, and token usage. |
| dsh-shortcuts | 34 pre-registered keyboard shortcuts plus one-click recording to bind your own. |
| dsh-mermaid | Renders Mermaid fences as sanitized, theme-aware SVG diagrams in the conversation. |
| dsh-visualize | Lets the model render interactive HTML cards into the chat stream, sandboxed — generative UI without leaving the session. |
Memory & context
The category with the most churn in the ecosystem — and the highest impact on long-running work.
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-context | A context-insight panel showing exactly what is filling the model’s window and why. The most-starred standalone plugin, and the first thing we’d install to understand dsh’s context economics. |
| dsh-memento | Bounded, layered, approval-gated cross-session memory with SQLite storage — engineered against silent context pollution. |
| dsh-plugin-focus | Pins objective, constraints, and decisions to a durable focus board that survives compaction and session switches. |
| dsh-library | Local document knowledge base with hybrid semantic + keyword search and citation-aware injection — no model downloads. |
Models & routing
Everything-is-a-plugin cuts deepest here: the model layer itself is yours to rewire.
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-tier-router | Two-tier routing — a strong model plans and reviews, a cheap model implements, with automatic escalation on failure. The clearest cost/quality win in the ecosystem. |
| dsh-local-ai | Ollama integration: discover, pull, and route to local models with automatic cloud fallback per task type. |
| dsh-claude-cli | Runs your existing Claude Code subscription as a model backend instead of a metered API key. |
| dsh-codex-oauth | Uses a ChatGPT/Codex subscription inside dsh via OAuth, including image generation and web search. |
| dsh-llm-fallbacks | Role-based retry and fallback strategies across providers. |
Cost & usage
dsh makes token economics visible — these plugins make it governable.
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-budget | Cost governance done right: per-model/session/day metering, session/daily/monthly caps, threshold alerts, and over-limit policies (alert/block/degrade). |
| dsh-bill | Per-call cost tracking priced from models.dev and OpenRouter (8,000+ models), with per-turn attribution and forecast. |
| dsh-api-balance | Real-time DeepSeek account balance in the composer dock — small, obvious, useful. |
Sessions, migration & sync
Coming from Claude Code, Codex, or OpenCode? This category is why switching costs less than you’d expect.
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-claude-move | Four-source migration wizard: moves Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, and Hermes sessions, memories, skills, and slash commands into dsh as resumable sessions. |
| dsh-movein | Moves an entire Claude Code setup — skills, MCP servers, hooks, subagents, permission rules — in one command, with a dry-run estimate and diff report. |
| dsh-checkpoint-rewind | Claude Code-style /rewind for dsh: git-first workspace snapshots, turn-boundary forks, one-shot restore. |
| dsh-fork-graph | Git-style fork graph for conversations with colored lanes and click-to-jump — makes branch-heavy agent work legible. |
| dsh-session-sync | Cross-device session sync through a dedicated git mirror with append-only three-way merge. |
Notifications & integrations
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-im | Connects dsh to Feishu, WeChat, DingTalk, WeCom, QQ, Slack, Telegram, Discord, and WhatsApp through one settings page — the integration plugin if you run long jobs. |
Tools & capabilities
| Plugin | Why it earns a slot |
|---|---|
| dsh-browser | Self-contained Playwright browser runtime exposing nine interactive browser tools. |
| dsh-computer-use | Accessibility-first macOS computer use with fresh observations, stale-state rejection, and scoped permissions. |
| dsh-fleet | Pools idle machines — LAN servers, friends’ PCs, cloud instances — into one compute team and dispatches agent tasks to any online member. |
| dsh-univer-office | Creates and edits spreadsheets, documents, presentations, and databases with live preview — real deliverables, not markdown tables. |
How to vet a plugin before installing
This is the section the catalogs won’t write. DeepSeek labels dsh a developer preview, and third-party bundles are executable code, not prompts — installing one runs it on your machine with your permissions. Nothing in the ecosystem constitutes a security review. Our baseline:
- Read the source. Non-negotiable for anything touching credentials, the network, or your filesystem. Check what the plugin’s tools can access.
- Run the scorecard tools. The ecosystem has started auditing itself — dsh-quality-score grades plugins 0–100 across manifest health, freshness, and compatibility; dsh-score scores install success, maintenance, docs, security, and protocol compliance with CLI evidence.
- Smoke-test in a throwaway profile. dsh-test-drive installs plugins into isolated
DSH_HOMEprofiles and emits structured pass/fail matrices; dsh-plugin-doctor adds manifest/build/install verification and a supply-chain poison preflight. - Prefer trust-tiered browsing. dsh-plugin-list-plus renders your installed-plugin list with trust tiers and per-plugin detail — a saner default than raw marketplace browsing.
A sobering baseline: the developer-preview label means breaking changes are coming, and a plugin that works today may not after the next dsh release. Pin versions, keep profiles per-project, and revisit the compatibility-sensitive picks (model routers, memory plugins) after each dsh upgrade.
dsh vs the established coding agents
The plugin architecture is the whole ballgame. Claude Code’s edge is frontier Claude models and deep codebase context; OpenCode’s is 75+ provider support with build/plan agent modes; Cursor’s is the polished editor-native loop. dsh’s edge is that none of its layers are load-bearing — you can swap the model, the sandbox, the memory, even the UI, without maintaining a fork. Whether that matters to you is whether dsh is your tool. Our full breakdowns: dsh vs Claude Code, dsh vs OpenCode, dsh vs Cursor, or the DeepSeek Harness directory entry.
FAQ
Is there an official dsh plugin store?
No. DeepSeek’s official guidance is to tag repositories with the dsh-plugin topic for discoverability; curation is entirely community-run (DSH Get, dsh-suite, awesome lists, in-app store plugins). Treat every listing as unvetted.
How many DeepSeek Harness plugins are there?
The dsh-plugin GitHub topic passed 6,000 repositories in dsh’s first week, and community catalogs index roughly 2,400–2,600 installable plugins as of late August 2026. The number grows daily — another reason to rely on curated entry points rather than raw counts.
Do dsh plugins work with local models? Yes — the model provider is itself a plugin, and integrations like dsh-local-ai (Ollama) route work to local models with optional cloud fallback. This is one of the clearest advantages of the everything-is-a-plugin design.
Is it too early to build a workflow on dsh? For production-critical automation, yes — it is a developer preview with announced breaking changes. For personal daily driving, no: profiles isolate experiments, the migration plugins reduce switching costs, and the ecosystem is moving too fast to ignore. Our recommendation: adopt the harness, pin your versions, and keep each project’s plugin set in its own profile.