dsh-engineering-skills

Matt Pocock's skills — 27 engineering and productivity agent skills (grilling, spec/ticket flows, TDD, code review, domain modelling, handoff, …) — packaged as a DeepSeek Harness plugin bundle: one dsh plugin add and all 27 show up in the session skill catalog and the / menu; removing the plugin removes them cleanly.

The harness is in developer preview and iterates quickly — expect compatibility-breaking changes.

中文说明见 README.zh.md.

Screenshots

Skill suggestions in the / menu: grill-me and grill-with-docs carry the user-only marker (the model can never auto-invoke them), while grilling is model-invoked (it is also in the model's catalog):

Why a plugin at all

You do not need this plugin to use the skills: DSH's filesystem provider scans ~/.agents/skills (rank 500) and <project>/.agents/skills (rank 200) by default, and upstream's installer drops the same SKILL.md trees there — the format, frontmatter and disable-model-invocation semantics are already identical.

The plugin adds: one-command install/uninstall managed by the profile, versioned updates pinned to an upstream commit (UPSTREAM.json, sync --check), no writes to the shared ~/.agents/skills, category/name filtering to keep the catalog prompt small, and a short DSH tool-mapping note appended on load.

Install

Prerequisites

The dsh CLI must be on your PATH (npm install -g @deepseek-ai/dsh, or prefix commands with npx @deepseek-ai/dsh). This release is verified on harness 0.2.1-rc.2.

Add the bundle

# 1. add the bundle to your web profile (pnpm-backed; the built lib/ is committed,
#    so no build script runs at install time). Prefer a release tag (#v0.1.2);
#    #main tracks the latest commit.
dsh plugin --profile web add "github:tianji-qingtian/dsh-engineering-skills#v0.1.2"

# 2. restart the harness with that profile — `add` only edits the profile files;
#    a running instance does not hot-load the new bundle
dsh --profile web

After the restart the / menu lists all 27 skills (16 user-only + 11 dual-channel) and the model catalog carries the 11 model-invoked ones; dsh-engineering-skills appears under Settings → Plugins.

Local path for development:

dsh plugin --profile web add <local-checkout>/dsh-engineering-skills

Config

- id: engineering-skills
  config:
    categories: [productivity]          # engineering | productivity (default: both)
    skills: [grilling, grill-me, tdd]   # explicit subset; overrides categories
    appendHarnessGuide: true            # append the DSH tool-mapping note on load
    providerName: engineering-skills    # registry provider name

A non-empty skills list overrides categories entirely; unknown categories or skill names fail the mount instead of silently shrinking the catalog.

Mapping (upstream → DSH)

Upstream	DSH
SKILL.md bundle + YAML frontmatter	same format, parsed by the skill registry
disable-model-invocation: true (16 skills)	{ modelInvocable: false, userInvocable: true } — / menu only, never in the catalog or skill tool
default (11 model-invoked)	{ modelInvocable: true, userInvocable: true } — catalog + skill tool + /name
/name slash command	/name gesture, host injects the same <skill_content> block; no commands needed
agents/openai.yaml	dropped (Codex UI metadata, unread by DSH)
referenced sub-files (25)	resourceBase: { kind: 'directory' }; the skill result carries the base directory
Skill tool wording	rewritten by the sync script to `skill` tool

Syncing upstream

node scripts/sync-upstream.mjs                  # re-fetch the pinned commit and rebuild skills/
node scripts/sync-upstream.mjs --source ../mp-skills   # use an existing clone
node scripts/sync-upstream.mjs --check          # CI drift gate

Both modes also verify that UPSTREAM.json version matches the version declared by the fetched upstream commit (package.json / .claude-plugin/plugin.json), so a stale version string cannot pass --check by being copied into the manifest.

Release flow: bump UPSTREAM.json → sync → pnpm test → tag. Only skills listed in upstream's .claude-plugin/plugin.json ship; in-progress/ and misc/ never do.

Known limits

• ask-matt needs a rewrite: it promises to read other user-invoked skills' bodies, which DSH deliberately never exposes to the model. Recast it as human-facing navigation ("run /x yourself").
• implement-spec worktrees: no first-party worktree tool; the skill must drive git worktree itself or run serially.
• triage / wayfinder / to-* need an issue tracker: prefer the setup skill's Local-markdown mode (.scratch/) where gh/glab are unavailable.
• improve-codebase-architecture report relies on CDN Tailwind/Mermaid; prefer self-contained HTML offline.
• Temp/output: OS temp and open become workspace paths + present.
• Catalog cost: 11 model-invoked descriptions are resident each request; trim with categories.
• English bodies: add a language line to the project's AGENTS.md for Chinese output.
• Harness upgrades: bump the @deepseek-ai/dsh-skill peer range with each runtime prerelease and re-run pnpm test.

Harness compatibility

Only @deepseek-ai/dsh-skill is gated as a peer (checked at install and at profile startup; an out-of-range bundle is skipped with skipping profile bundle …, i.e. the plugin silently disappears after a harness upgrade). Prerelease semver needs an explicit match: ^0.2.1-rc.2 covers 0.2.1-rc.2 and later 0.2.x releases but not a new prerelease such as 0.2.2-rc.1, so bump the peer range on each harness prerelease and re-run pnpm test. No build step is involved: lib/ is runnable ESM and skills/ is data.

Development

Managed with pnpm 11.28.5 (packageManager field; CI pins the same version). Other major pnpm versions may rewrite pnpm-lock.yaml; check the lockfile diff before committing. The contract baseline is REQUIREMENTS.md — change it first when a service, field or config semantic moves.

pnpm install
pnpm test                 # 23 assertions + real registry/lifecycle + bundle/package contract
pnpm run sync:check       # upstream drift + pin-version gate

test-package.mjs checks the cordis.patch.yml insert row, the npm files whitelist, manifest-vs-tree consistency and the peer/license files; CI additionally unpacks the packed tarball and imports it, so the published artifact is exercised, not just the repo.

License

Plugin code MIT (LICENSE); skills/ is MIT content from Matt Pocock (full text in LICENSE-upstream) — see NOTICE and UPSTREAM.json for attribution, the exact rewrite list and the pinned source.