gentle-ai-dsh

A gentle-ai persona, skills and optional Engram memory for DeepSeek Harness (dsh). It also ships the gentle-ai orchestrator with its ODD workflow.

V2 status

The gentle-ai orchestrator and its ODD protocol ship as the gentle-ai:orchestrator system-prompt section (#9). Explore, worker and verify subagents for dsh web (#10) and their integration and docs (#11) are in progress under the tracking issue #3. Contributors: start with the v2 plan and handoff.

For what the plugin does and what it reuses from gentle-ai, see the overview.

Install and remove

Requires Node.js 24.9 or newer and dsh. Add the checkout to each profile you use:

dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/gentle-ai-dsh
dsh plugin --profile headless add /path/to/gentle-ai-dsh
dsh --profile web --dump-config
dsh --profile headless --dump-config

The dump should include the gentle-ai-dsh layer. From a dsh source checkout, use pnpm dsh in place of dsh, for example pnpm dsh plugin --profile web add /path/to/gentle-ai-dsh.

Remove it separately from each profile:

dsh plugin --profile web remove gentle-ai-dsh
dsh plugin --profile headless remove gentle-ai-dsh

Engram memory

Persistent memory requires the engram executable on PATH. Install it with brew install gentleman-programming/tap/engram (see Engram) and restart dsh. Without Engram, dsh still boots with the persona and skills, but memory is unavailable: the plugin adds a system-prompt note so the agent can tell you how to install it, and logs a warning through dsh. The plugin does not download binaries.

dsh runs one Engram process for all sessions, started from the directory dsh was launched in, so Engram's default project is that launch directory. To keep memories in the session's own project, the plugin instructs the agent to start an Engram session with mem_session_start (passing the session's working directory as directory) and pass the returned project as project on every Engram call. Engram only accepts an explicit project backed by known context, and starting a session provides it, even for a workspace Engram has never seen. This is a prompt instruction, not enforcement: dsh 0.2.x cannot rewrite tool arguments or scope an MCP server per session.

As a hard backstop, the plugin also denies Engram writes (mem_save, mem_update, mem_session_summary, mem_save_prompt) that do not pass the project returned by mem_session_start for the session's current working directory. The denial message tells the agent the exact call to make and the project to pass, so it can retry correctly. Reads are never blocked.

Content and tests

Content comes from a pinned gentle-ai ref. To update it, bump gentleAi.ref in package.json, then run:

npm run sync
npm test

GitHub Actions runs npm test on Linux and Windows for every pull request and every push to main (.github/workflows/test.yml).

See content sync for details and spike findings for historical verification. The sync uses Git and network access.

License

MIT. Content copied from gentle-ai keeps its upstream license; see NOTICE.