dsh-prompt-balance

Measure what your system prompt is actually made of — then make sure the model reads the operating protocol before it reads the prohibitions.

Works on DeepSeek Harness (DSH). Two hooks, no build step, no dependencies.

---

The problem

Long-running agents accumulate rules: an AGENTS.md that grew to 65 KB, a workspace policy, a template guide, a data-security annex. Nobody measures the result. In one real case the breakdown was 65% rules / 10.7% identity — the model's first screen of text was fourteen kilobytes of "don't", almost nothing about who it was working for or what good work looked like.

Two consequences follow:

1. You cannot argue about prompt quality without numbers. "My prompt feels bloated" is not actionable; "rules are 42,331 bytes of 64,902, and they sit first" is.
2. Order matters. Instructions near the front of the assembly carry more weight than the same instructions buried after a wall of constraints.

What it does

Hook	Effect
system-prompt/assemble	Writes every section's byte size to ~/.dsh/prompt-balance.log, then prepends one short <operator-protocol> block before all rule sections. Idempotent: it will not stack a second gate.
agent/pre-step	AGENTS.md arrives as an ordinary message, so context compression treats it as history and can summarize the specifics away. This hook prefixes a ~250-byte identity digest so the "who am I serving" frame survives the fold.

Install

dsh plugin --profile desktop add dsh-prompt-balance
# or, to try a local checkout first:
dsh plugin --profile desktop add link:/absolute/path/to/dsh-prompt-balance

Restart the app. The plugin logs one line at install and one line per assembly, so you can verify it is live:

tail -f ~/.dsh/prompt-balance.log

Configure — this is the part that matters

Out of the box the identity block is a placeholder. The gate only earns its keep when it names a real person doing real work. Create ~/.dsh/prompt-balance.json:

{
  "identity": [
    "I am the assistant to one person: a regional manager running a multi-city store network",
    "Their output is analysis, slide decks, and operating ledgers.",
    "",
    "Their five recurring failures: claiming done without verifying, coarse self-review,",
    "pasting parts without classifying them, skipping workflow steps, acting before review.",
    "",
    "So: concrete things first, structure second; every conclusion carries its source;",
    "find the flaws yourself before shipping."
  ],
  "gate": [
    "You serve one person, not a ticket queue. Six checks before you answer:",
    "1. Enumerate before you abstract...",
    "2. Specific beats categorical..."
  ]
}

Both keys are optional and independent:

• identity — a string array, joined with newlines. Used in the gate and in the pre-step digest.
• gate — a string array. First line is the framing sentence, the rest are the numbered checks.

Delete the file to return to defaults. Nothing else in the plugin is configurable, and it never writes to your config.

What you get in the log

[2026-10-30T07:12:44.118Z] installed: system-prompt/assemble hook active (gate prepend + composition log; config C:\Users\you\.dsh\prompt-balance.json)
[2026-10-30T07:12:51.902Z] assemble: sections=30 in=19805B out=20862B gate=1057B rules=12943B (65.4%) top=genui:fence:5068 dsh-taste-skill:2949 identity:2402
[2026-10-30T07:12:51.905Z] pre-step: instructions 14289B -> 14539B (changed=true)

in/out/gate are byte counts, so you can prove the cost of the gate itself. rules is the sum of sections whose names match instruction|agents|workspace|memory|rule; if your host names its sections differently, that number is meaningless — read the top= list instead.

Compatibility

• DSH kernel 0.2.1-rc.* and later. Verified against @deepseek-ai/dsh-system-prompt lib/index.js:398 — the waterfall passes (assembly, context, next), three parameters. A handler declared with four parameters throws next is not a function and takes every tool call down with it; this plugin declares three.
• Node 20+. No runtime dependencies.
• Nothing throws at import time: a failed loader entry makes the desktop app show its recovery dialog, so every step is wrapped and reported to the log instead.

Uninstall

dsh plugin --profile desktop remove dsh-prompt-balance

The log file stays at ~/.dsh/prompt-balance.log; delete it yourself if you want it gone.

License

MIT.