dsh-ask-user-timeout

Guard plugin for DeepSeek Harness: gives the model-facing ask_user_question tool a bounded lifetime, so a question that no browser tab renders cannot hang the agent loop forever.

The bug this fixes

When the model calls ask_user_question, the tool call parks the loop until a human answers in the Web UI. The question is rendered only by the live browser composer takeover (ui-user-questions). If no tab is actively showing that session — tab closed, backgrounded overnight, mux connection dropped — nothing renders the question, and nothing ever times it out:

• the turn stays "in progress" indefinitely (no timeout, no re-notification, no visible error);
• the only exit is a manual stop, which surfaces a misleading ASK_ABORTED ("aborted before the user answered") even though the question was never shown to anyone.

This plugin wraps ask_user_question's execution with a cooperative deadline (the same deadline() primitive the shipped timeout-policy guard uses). When the deadline wins, the tool returns a structured, model-visible ASK_TIMEOUT result instead of hanging forever — the loop moves on and the model can re-ask or proceed.

Install

# public GitHub install (works without an npm account)
dsh plugin --profile web add git+https://github.com/yeruizhi/dsh-ask-user-timeout.git

Restart dsh web, then hard-refresh the browser. The wrapper applies to ask_user_question calls in sessions created after the plugin loads.

Configuration

key	default	meaning
timeoutMs	600000 (10 min)	how long a pending ask_user_question may wait before it times out

# ~/.dsh/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml
- insert:
    - id: ask-user-timeout
      name: 'dsh-ask-user-timeout'
      config:
        timeoutMs: 300000

How it works

• Listens on tools/execute (same extension point as the official timeout-policy guard).
• Only wraps tools named ask_user_question; everything else delegates unchanged.
• Swaps exec.signal for the fused deadline during dispatch, restores the upstream signal afterwards.
• On timeout, substitutes a result with error.code = ASK_TIMEOUT; a nested/upstream deadline reads as an ordinary cancel and passes through untouched.
• Does not change the tool's schema, output shape, or semantics.

Scope

This is a guard plugin, not a fix to the Web UI rendering gap. It stops the hang; the deeper issue (a question nobody renders is never re-notified on tab return / reconnect) is tracked upstream in deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness discussion #2929.

License

MIT