dsh-progress-rules

A DeepSeek Harness (DSH) bundle plugin that makes agents report progress instead of silently running dozens of tool steps.

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What it does

Two independent layers, both mounted by one bundle row:

1. System-prompt section — user:progress-rules at order 10150 (after the Web surface section, before the deployment persona suffix). It carries your process-discipline rules and is re-rendered on every request, so conversation compaction can never summarize it away. It uses its own section name, so a preset's @deepseek-ai/dsh-persona row cannot shadow it the way it shadows the deployment personaSuffix.

2. Deterministic nudge — on every agent/pre-step, the plugin checks whether the previous assistant message contained any text block. If it only carried tool calls (or reasoning), that step counts as silent. After everySteps consecutive silent steps it injects one user-role reminder into the next admitted step: "you ran tools without reporting, narrate in 1–3 sentences before continuing". The reminder is a durable context message rendered as a progress-rules context row, not as a message from the user. Any narrated step resets the counter.

The first layer is advisory for the model. The second layer is what actually breaks the "40 silent steps" pattern, because the harness inserts the reminder itself instead of trusting the model to remember a rule.

Install

DSH plugins are installed into a profile ($DSH_HOME/profiles/<name>), not globally:

cd ~/.dsh/profiles/desktop      # or web / tui / your own profile
npm install dsh-progress-rules

Then add the bundle to the profile's package.json (order matters: bundles compose in list order, so put it after the base bundles):

{
  "dependencies": {
    "dsh-progress-rules": "^0.2.1"
  },
  "dsh": {
    "profile": {
      "bundles": [
        "@deepseek-ai/dsh-base",
        "@deepseek-ai/dsh-web-app",
        "dsh-progress-rules"
      ]
    }
  }
}

Restart DSH afterwards. If your DSH build ships the dsh plugin command, adding the dependency and the bundles entry is what that command does for you.

Configuration

The bundle patch (cordis.patch.yml inside this package) declares one row:

- insert:
    - id: progress-rules
      name: dsh-progress-rules
      config:
        everySteps: 5
        text: |
          ## 过程纪律（优先于其他风格偏好）
          ...

Override it from the profile's cordis.patch.yml by targeting the same row id. Patch semantics replace the whole row config, so restate every key you keep:

- id: progress-rules
  name: dsh-progress-rules
  config:
    everySteps: 3
    text: |
      ## Process discipline
      1. Narrate progress after every step.
      2. Ask when uncertain instead of guessing.

Key	Default	Meaning
text	bundled Chinese rules	System-prompt section text. Empty drops the section.
name	user:progress-rules	Section name.
order	10150	Section order (WEB_SURFACE is 10100, persona suffix 10200).
enforce	true	false disables the per-step nudge, leaving only the prompt section.
reminder	bundled one-liner	Text injected before a silent step. Empty disables the nudge.
everySteps	5	Consecutive silent steps before one reminder. 1 = every step, larger = quieter.

Why not AGENTS.md or personaSuffix?

• AGENTS.md is loaded as a durable user message in conversation history. On long tasks DSH compaction may summarize it away; the system prompt is never compacted.
• system-prompt.personaSuffix is shadowed for preset sessions: the shipped Standard / PTC / Minimal presets mount @deepseek-ai/dsh-persona, which registers the same deployment:persona-suffix section with empty text, hiding the deployment value. A differently named section avoids that entirely.

Compatibility

• Tested with DSH 0.2.1-rc.2, Standard preset, deepseek-v4.1-flash:1017-cloud.
• Plain ESM, no Cordis imports, no runtime dependencies; uses node:crypto.
• The nudge detects silence by checking text blocks in the last assistant message. A provider that reports assistant text in a custom block type would not be recognized — open an issue.

License

MIT