dsh-rea

A DeepSeek Harness plugin bundle that mounts the REA (Reverse Engineer Anything) MCP server as the rea tool namespace — and gives it an ordinary on/off switch in the Plugins page.

This package ships no analysis engine, no tool implementation, and no model code. It is a declaration: one MCP bridge row, plus the display metadata that makes it a card in the plugin list. Every actual REA tool is discovered from the rea-agents package at run time.

Why a bundle instead of a YAML snippet

Dropping the same six lines into ~/.dsh/cordis.patch.yml works, but that row is invisible to the Plugins page — the page lists bundles (packages that carry a dsh.bundle.patch), not free-standing rows. Wrapping the row in a bundle is what turns it into a switch you can click, or click back off after the investigation.

The switch matters because the rea namespace is expensive while it is on: about 200 tool schemas travel in every request.

State	Tools sent	Tool-definition context
dsh-rea off	~40 built-in	~2K–8K tokens
dsh-rea on	~40 + ~207	~200K tokens

Measured against rea-agents@6.5.0 on a 1M-token window: the schemas serialize to ~790 KB, which the harness prices at ~207K tokens, roughly 20% of the window. The figure moves with the REA release; it is never zero while the bundle is on.

Install

From GitHub:

dsh plugin add github:PandaBoby/dsh-rea

Or from a local checkout, which is the form to use while developing this package:

dsh plugin add /absolute/path/to/dsh-rea

Installation also selects the bundle, so rea tools appear right away; switch it off in the Plugins page when you are done. Grab the matching skill from rea-agents (or from the REA repository) if you want the model to have REA's own procedure guidance; this package deliberately does not duplicate it.

The REA server itself is not downloaded at install time. The bridge runs npx -y rea-agents@latest mcp, so npm fetches the newest release on the first tool sync after the switch is turned on (and reuses its cache afterwards).

Turn it off and on

Plugins page → Installed plugins → dsh-rea — flip the switch.

• On — the MCP bridge starts, lists REA's tools, and registers them under mcp__rea__*.
• Off — the row is withdrawn, the child process is disposed, and the tool schemas stop being sent. Later requests are ~200K tokens lighter.

The switch is a profile-level setting: it applies to every session of the profile, including sessions that are already open. Turning it off while a REA call is running cancels that call.

No restart is needed when HMR is enabled (the default in Desktop and Web profiles). Without HMR, the change applies on the next start.

Configuration

Defaults live in cordis.patch.yml. Override the rea-mcp row from your profile patch when you need to pin a REA version, raise the call timeout for slow decompilation, or make startup failures loud:

- id: rea-mcp
  config:
    serverName: rea
    transport: stdio
    command: npx
    args: ["-y", "rea-agents@6.5.0", "mcp"]
    toolCallTimeoutMs: 600000
    failOnStartupError: false

A patch replaces a row's whole config rather than merging into it, so restate every key you want to keep.

Key	Default	Meaning
serverName	rea	Namespace of the tool names (mcp__rea__<tool>); max 32 chars
command / args	npx + -y rea-agents@latest mcp	The stdio server to launch
toolCallTimeoutMs	60000	Per-call budget; raise it for long analyses
failOnStartupError	false	true fails the plugin instead of silently exposing no tools
reconnect	built-in policy	Retry/backoff when the child process drops

Verify what it costs

The context meter above the composer breaks usage into system prompt, tool definitions, and messages. Toggle the bundle and compare the tool definitions row — that delta is what this plugin costs. Alternatively, read the latest request/header from a session log under ~/.dsh/sessions/ and count the mcp__rea__* entries.

Uninstall

Plugins page → dsh-rea → Remove. Removing the bundle unregisters the row and lets you delete the package; the npx cache is outside the profile and stays until npm or npx clears it.

Layout

package.json        name, description, icon, dsh.bundle.patch
cordis.patch.yml    the one insert row: mcp-client connected to `rea mcp`
icon.svg            card artwork
locale/en.json      card title + description
locale/zh.json      same, Chinese

Licence

MIT. REA itself is a separate project with its own licence; this package only declares how to reach it.