Price terms as published
Each line is the vendor’s own wording, split from the price capture checked on 2026-09-22. Nothing here is rounded, converted or re-worded — the full sentences stay in the review below. Lines that carry only a price continue the plan named on the line above, in the vendor’s own order.
| # | Plan / term | Checked |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Free (MIT) | 2026-09-22 |
One-liner: DeepSeek Harness (dsh) is an open-source agent harness built by DeepSeek AI around an “everything is a plugin” architecture, launched from a single npx command.
Verified facts (checked 2026-09-22)
| Attribute | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| GitHub stars | 232,160 (27,846 forks) | deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness via GitHub API, 2026-09-22 |
| License | MIT | GitHub API / LICENSE, 2026-09-22 |
| Repository created | 2026-08-13 | GitHub API |
| Last push | 2026-09-17 | GitHub API |
| Owner | deepseek-ai (the official DeepSeek org; beware lookalike forks) | repository metadata |
| Entry point | npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web (starts the Web UI at http://127.0.0.1:3080) |
repository README |
What it actually does
The harness positions itself as infrastructure for running AI agents rather than as a single chatbot. Its plugin system is built on Cordis, the same composition framework behind the Koishi ecosystem, so models, tools, UI surfaces and integrations are all plugins rather than hard-coded parts of the core. The README links an accompanying paper, A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability, as the architectural reference.
Running it needs only Node.js: npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web starts a local Web UI and opens it in the default browser; --no-open keeps it server-only, which is the mode intended for SSH sessions. A source checkout builds with pnpm (pnpm install && pnpm run build && pnpm dsh web). The project also publishes a dsh-plugin GitHub topic for third-party plugin discoverability and maintains documentation, a Discord server and GitHub Discussions.
What the marketing doesn’t say
The README is unusually direct about maturity: “THERE WILL BE COMPATIBILITY-BREAKING CHANGES.” It is explicitly a developer preview iterating rapidly, so plugins, configs or tutorials written against today’s build can stop working. The README also asks readers to review a safety notice before running the project — appropriate for software that can execute agent-driven actions on your machine. Third-party dependency licenses are disclosed separately in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md, so “MIT” describes the project’s own code, not necessarily every bundled dependency.
Who should use it
Developers who want a vendor-owned, MIT-licensed harness with a real plugin ecosystem and the momentum of a 230k-star project, and who can tolerate pre-1.0 churn. If you need a stable long-term-support base with frozen interfaces, wait for the project to leave developer preview before building production workflows on top of it.
Repository stats, license text and run instructions verified against primary sources on 2026-09-22. This entry follows our verification policy: every claim here was checked against primary sources, not copied from other reviews.