deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness

Use when writing or changing a model-facing tool definition (name, description, parameter schema, or its system-prompt section), and when designing skills, context loading, or multi-step workflows, to make information discoverable and use context efficiently.

Use when adding, auditing, pruning, archiving, restoring, or reviewing Agent Notes in deepseek-harness; checks every new note for superseded active records, deletes small UI and purely mechanical records, classifies other implemented notes by future decision value, deletes rejected notes that no longer prevent a tempting fallacy, and applies the frozen archived/{kind} triplet and manifest rules.

Design, review, and diagnose DeepSeek Harness tests and fixtures that can fail nondeterministically under CI concurrency, shared host resources, clocks, process-global state, subprocesses, network listeners, or asynchronous teardown. Use when adding or changing tests with those risks, investigating flaky CI, or reviewing test isolation; use dsh-pre-push-checks separately to select outgoing commands.

Design and review DeepSeek Harness client UI changes — visual token discipline, reuse-before-adding, feedback surfaces (toast vs in-place notice vs empty state), overlay and menu safety, platform window adaptation, loading states, and error copy placement. Use when adding or changing product-user-visible GUI behavior in packages/client, or when reviewing such a PR.

Use when reviewing a pull request in the deepseek-harness repo — orients the reviewer to this codebase's standards (AGENTS.md conventions, defensive patterns, ADRs, quality gates) and the review-specific checks that code alone can't show

Use when a deepseek-harness change breaks an externally perceptible surface (CLI, profiles, cordis.yml or settings keys, persisted user data, SDK or wire APIs, published package entry points), or when changing a surface that an unreleased upgrade guide already covers, to write or update docs/upgrade-guide/v<version>/<item>/guide.md.

Create, restructure, review, audit, or migrate DeepSeek Harness Markdown documentation, package READMEs, and the documentation website using audience-first hierarchy, kind-mapped YAML metadata, bilingual line alignment, summary/contents navigation, progressive user-to-developer detail, executed-operation fact-checking, and repository validation. Use for new or revised DSH docs, docs-tree organization, documentation-quality audits and budgets, website page publishing, and bilingual documentation structure changes.

Apply error-handling principles when designing or reviewing failures, recovery, retries, background tasks, and user-visible error reports.

Find evidence-backed simplifications in DeepSeek Harness code, APIs, configuration, tests, and prose; write or consolidate proposals, identify small inline cleanups, or assess simplifications from another branch. Use for removing dead, duplicated, speculative, or unnecessarily maintained behavior and infrastructure.

Use when landing a stack of dependent GitHub PRs (A ← B ← C, where each bases on the one below) onto master, merging a PR whose base is another open PR's branch, or whenever a request mentions "stacked PRs", "PR stack", "dependent PRs", or merging several related PRs in sequence. Requires every same-repository dependency chain to use GitHub's official stacked-PR feature before landing so GitHub owns stack-wide rules, CI, ordering, retargeting, and merge state.

Use before pushing, force-pushing, marking ready for review, or claiming checks pass on a deepseek-harness branch, and immediately after gh stack sync publishes rewritten branches, to select the smallest tests and checks that cover the outgoing or just-published diff without reflexively running the full repository suite.

Use when writing, reviewing, restoring, trimming, or auditing prose in the deepseek-harness repo, including deciding where documentation or comments are required across Markdown, JSDoc, code and test comments, prompts, descriptions, diagnostics, and CLI or UI strings.

Use when investigating or optimizing DeepSeek Harness performance, designing realistic synthetic benchmarks or CI performance gates, profiling long Sessions or Web responsiveness, or turning performance PR evidence into measured behavior-preserving fixes.

Manually run the extended DeepSeek Harness bilingual-document workflow, including generated briefings, delegated prose translation, whole-document translation, and scoped pairing verification.

Use when auditing or fixing prose that reads like a leaked reasoning transcript — dead design-session citations such as (decision N), audit item codes, or §N of uncommitted drafts; change narration such as "used to", "no longer", "this cut"; stack or review vantage ("a later PR in this stack", "rejected in review"); reviewer-addressed justifications; control-flow narration; or hedged planning residue in comments, JSDoc, docs, or Agent Notes.

Record browser or Web UI interaction demos as optimized GIFs using the available browser-control workflow, optional Playwright Videos for higher capture frame rates, and deterministic encoding, then attach the GIF to a pull request with `gh --attach`, falling back to a dedicated assets branch where attach cannot apply. Use when asked to make, record, or generate a GIF that demonstrates a browser workflow, and for every pull request that changes product-user-visible GUI behavior, which MUST include a GIF recorded from the pull request's real server and model flow.

Inspect the bundled Preview workspace and its deterministic Session examples.

Use when writing or changing a model-facing tool definition (name, description, parameter schema, or its system-prompt section), and when designing skills, context loading, or multi-step workflows, to make information discoverable and use context efficiently.

Use when writing or reading a Cordis bundle patch or agent preset for this harness and you need the Loader YAML dialect (insert, override by id, group, disabled, isolate, !!js) or the list of installable Harness plugin packages and what each provides.

Use when designing, reviewing, adding, enabling, disabling, installing, configuring, or debugging a plugin, bundle, feature, page, panel, tool, or MCP connection in the current Harness profile, including a shipped plugin that is disabled by default, and for any visual object, decoration, or widget request that names no other destination, which means an installed UI plugin rendered in the Harness Web UI.

Use when creating, changing, or validating an agent preset or other Cordis composition for this harness, including deciding host versus preset placement and checking that an authored preset mounts.

Use on Windows for unexpected DSH sandbox access denials: workspace writes or listing fail, or an ordinarily readable path cannot be read. One bundled command inspects the path and every ancestor and repairs the ACL problems it proves in that same run. Expected confinement denials need no ACL repair.

Create, read, edit, and check Word documents (.docx), including reports, letters, and formatted tables. Use when a DOCX file is an input or requested deliverable. Load this skill before running Office commands. Use only bundled LibreOffice unless the user explicitly opts out; without that opt-out, do not search for another LibreOffice executable.

Create, read, edit, and check PowerPoint presentations (.pptx), including slide text, tables, images, and charts. Use when a PPTX file is an input or requested deliverable. Load this skill before running Office commands. Use only bundled LibreOffice unless the user explicitly opts out; without that opt-out, do not search for another LibreOffice executable.

Read, create, and modify Excel workbooks (.xlsx), including data, formulas, formatting, and pandas analysis. Use for Excel inputs or deliverables. Load before running Office commands. Data and formula tasks skip visual inspection; inspect only for formatting or layout needs. Use only bundled LibreOffice unless the user explicitly opts out; without that opt-out, do not search for another LibreOffice executable.

Prove user-disabled skills remain available to the model.

Exercise project skill discovery and loading in snapshot tests.

Prove model-disabled skills stay outside the model catalog.