DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows

273 pointsposted 9 hours ago
by Kuyawa

139 Comments

redox99

26 minutes ago

My problem with plugins is that I don't want to install stuff from third parties. It might be malware, become unsupported, or generally have a lower quality. I rather have a curated and polished feature set out of the box.

It's nice for having your AI create your own plugins. But I haven't really found the need yet.

JKCalhoun

22 minutes ago

We're probably living in VS-Code's world now.

Lucasoato

26 minutes ago

What's the CLI equivalent of DeepSeek Harness? Or anything that gets close to their cordis architecture concept, seems so interesting.

ssivark

8 hours ago

This page doesn't emphasize the cordis architecture [1], but that's the most exciting thing about this -- not just yet another harness. It has the potential to make this into something like the emacs of harnesses! I think this might be particularly potent for long-running agents.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25512

podgorniy

4 hours ago

It's no that fancy when is put in practical engineering terms. I've spend some time with the paper.

Paper describes such system whch has ability to enable/disable capabilities without process restart. Each plugin must follow specific shape: function to activate, function to deactivate it (both working, mutating the same shared context object), describe provided and required services. This, plus some ideas, like "every provider must outlive consumers when destructred" allows plug-n-play ensuring all dependencies are satisfied before the plugin is activated, lazy activation, and plugin deactivation/destruction.

dgellow

an hour ago

Sounds great but also like a fairly standard plugin interface? So, not emacs

ta20240528

an hour ago

I am slightly disappointed that emacs has not yet (somehow) become the leading agent. Seems built for it.

nicce

an hour ago

I guess some people don't like the extra hassle to get Vi bindings :-D

dgellow

15 minutes ago

What makes emacs a good interface for agentic stuff? I like emacs as an editor, I don’t really see what would make it useful for AI

scuppernong

8 hours ago

https://frontierharness.org/ allegedly this is on the Pareto frontier, though I don't know how good of a benchmark this really is. it seems to focus on one-shot type tasks, whereas the real utility of one harness over another seems to make itself known in long running tasks.

also this is a very limited static snapshot with one model as backend, I wish there were more consistently refreshed and diversified harness benchmarks.

polotics

6 hours ago

how could the authors of frontierharness.org not see they used the exact same symbol for Claude Code and OhMyPi?

hypfer

6 hours ago

The authors might lack vision capabilities?

It happens more often than you think, especially when VRAM is limited!

dgellow

an hour ago

What a strange world we live in where that comment actually makes sense, and not only as a joke

zihotki

4 hours ago

I wonder why there is no Github Copilot in the comparison. It also supports BYOK and is quite capable

cdelsolar

5 hours ago

i've seen "Pareto frontier" literally 500 thousand times in the last two weeks or so, and maybe once or twice before that. Can someone please explain what happened recently

zug_zug

an hour ago

So for me, literally I was trying to solve a problem with an AI agent and it threw the term at me. It is a real and useful concept, but my hypothesis is that a certain AI release started using and a bunch of people said "Oh this makes me sound smart/trendy" and started using it every chance they got.

We like to think we aren't token predictors, but the amount of sheer regurgitation I see from us humans makes me wonder (also "commoditize your complement", and so many others)

JKCalhoun

20 minutes ago

Oh, I'm convinced that at least I'm a token predictor. Most of the time.

233mhz

5 hours ago

It sounds fancy and technical. Like when people use "orders of magnitude" six times per thread on this forum but no ever ever use it irl

JKCalhoun

19 minutes ago

Ha ha, ask my daughters if I don't use "an order of magnitude better" IRL.

ordersofmag

15 minutes ago

How to say you've never met a physicist....

vrganj

5 hours ago

People realized AI is expensive and wanted a cool techy way to say "good bang for your buck"

zmmmmm

4 hours ago

"my model sucks but it does so cheaper than anybody else"

Kuyawa

9 hours ago

I just installed DeepSeek Harness for MacOS and it's a beast. The same great harness as before but now is an app you just click on your dock to run

All settings and workspaces are transferred so you don't lose anything, the only thing it lacks is a way to increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd - so I'll work on a plugin for that

I can't be happier

Edit: Asked DSH for a plugin to increase/decrease font and it delivered. Love it. Then asked for a plugin to ring a bell on questions and tasks finished, of course it delivered flawlessly. The same plugin architecture, extensible by the same AI

JKCalhoun

17 minutes ago

Yeah, changing the font size doesn't sound like it belongs in a plug-in, long term.

Now, if only DeepSeek Harness were open source…

sroerick

6 hours ago

Deepseek harness seems good but this thread feels astroturfy

fakwandi_priv

6 hours ago

Most of this thread seems neutral/skeptical with just that post being obvious. On the other hand the volume of jev threads we have been seeing these past 2 weeks..

dudisubekti

6 hours ago

Lol what? Have you seen actual shilled threads?

Check GPT-6 thread for example, now that's Astra-turfed lol.

ycui7

8 hours ago

you do can change font size in settings, but not with keyboard shortcut. for some reason, they decided to limit font size to 17 max.

Kuyawa

8 hours ago

Do the same as I did, ask it to develop a plugin to increase/decrease font and you will see results in one single task, dsh-zoom as a plugin, restart and done

johng

9 hours ago

Can you elaborate? What's better about it vs. other harnesses? What can it do that others can't?

I'm not sure what you mean by it's a beast.

cjbprime

8 hours ago

It has particularly good observability (the ability to see the full content of every prompt and response and tool call) compared to other harnesses, that's the main thing that stood out to me.

inexcf

4 hours ago

Weird. I don't use the official harnesses by OpenAI or Anthropic but with all others i tried there wasn't a single one that hides any of that. What harnesses did you compare to?

adammarples

an hour ago

Have you tried pressing ctrl+o?

dante54

20 minutes ago

I think what he meant was that it gives you good overall observabiity, over your entire context, kind of how langfuse or these platforms do, but it does so locally. A good philosophy i picked up is how they treat the transcript as the backbone of the product.

Kuyawa

8 hours ago

All LLMs work the same to a certain degree, it's a matter of personal preference, token cost and customization. I asked DSH to build a news aggregator for me and it built a really nice app from 30 news sources via rss feeds for less than 50 cents and presto, reading tech news has never been so gratifying

anonzzzies

6 hours ago

I feel like I live in another reality from others here; I read people saying things ‘while their jaws are hanging open’ (not said here literally but the feel is the same ; I see it in other threads on HN literally here though); why are we so chuffed with stuff that’s now been one shot for maybe already a year, but definitely the last 6 months? Literally everyone who tried LLMs know this and yet it seems a huge surprise to people here that it is so easy now? And that’s opposite of the people, also very much on HN, who say AI is shit at coding and will not replace humans because humans have to fix its bad code.

pylotlight

8 hours ago

literally every harness can do that tho, that doesn't really answer the question.

zarmin

8 hours ago

i read somewhere that it can write a plugin to change its font size

konart

7 hours ago

Pi can do this too.

logicchains

5 hours ago

It uses an append-only design for the context which rules out all kinds of cache-invalidation bugs that pop up regularly in other harnesses.

proc0

5 hours ago

Is this for the DS API or with the local version?

gigatexal

6 hours ago

What an ad! Do they pay you??

hypfer

6 hours ago

If you check the user bio then the answer might be "no, but equivalent to yes".

chvid

4 hours ago

We all love DeepSeek. They are what is standing between freedom and total submission to the AI oligarchs.

eru

3 hours ago

DeepSeek is great, but there's more than one provider of open weight models.

rheisen_

6 hours ago

Just wait until I add coding to https://blackbear.app... it's going to be ridiculous.

(blackbear.app was developed entirely by a custom harness architecture)

throwa356262

6 hours ago

Still in preview, but I think this update is only meant to simplify the installation process.

Not providing DSH as a simple to install package resulted in an unknown third party packaging it with some modifications and SEO the hell out of it to always come on top in Internet searches (even above DS):

deepseekharness[.]io

Could be just an ambitious engineer, but could equally easily be ran by cyber criminals or NSA.

hypfer

6 hours ago

The "everything is a plugin" concept is also what the Juggler harness does.

I'm not yet sure if it is really sensible long-term, but it is definitely now while we're still trying to figure out what exactly we want and need from LLMs and harnesses.

bsenftner

an hour ago

Imagine the wild fire when maliciously crafted plugins start being created, as you know they already are...

wg0

6 hours ago

DeepSeek harness is the OpenCode (better than OpenCode) of the web/desktop medium.

Good things about it are that it is extremely lightweight and fast. The communication between sub agents is two way in that a sub agent can midway send a message to parent and the parent can send a message midway to change the course of action of a sub agent and while this is happening, you can sitll continue talking to the model on the main thread.

Downside of DeepSeek is that it is constantly in flux which is understandable and they make it very clear themselves that the breaking changes are to be expected.

StrauXX

6 hours ago

I don't see much of a future for these kinds of intricate harnesses, or harnessing in general for that matter. As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink until they are at the level of vanilla Pi or not even that.

Good4boothee

4 hours ago

> As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink

That can be true only for locally hosted models. The more supplied tools can do, the less data has to be exchanged with OpenAI/Anthropic servers. So bad harness means both higher lag and token usage.

throwa356262

6 hours ago

On the contrary, I belive this will be the next battlefield.

My wild theory is that we already have AGI level models, but we are not yet using them correctly.

bsenftner

an hour ago

drives me up the wall, this shifting definition of AGI; folks, when we no longer need to train AI models at all because we have finally developed artificial comprehension is AGI. This propaganda imposed definition is for fools and sycophants.

Octoth0rpe

6 hours ago

My version of this theory is that we already have AGI, but Altman/Amodei/Zuck keep asking it for an infinite money glitch and it keeps (correctly!) saying "no money, humanity is fucked given the trajectory, and you in particular will be fucked once the general public decides that you're the scapegoat". A/A/Z decides the AGI is wrong of course, so obviously dumping another billion into training or reinforcement or tagging or whatever is the next step.

StrauXX

6 hours ago

If we had AGI, they could per definition build a harness better than any human could. In such a regime, (human) pre-built harnesses are moot.

010ED67913

5 hours ago

agi is artificial general intelligence. sol5.6, astra, fable are already wildly more intelligent than the average person. we already have agi. however people need to keep the moving target so they have something to talk about, otherwise the voracious appetite for novelty will not be met.

what we don’t have yet are the tools to take full advantage of the agi we do have. they’re coming soon.

bsenftner

an hour ago

AGI is when AI models no longer need any training at all, because they have comprehension, meaning human science finally developed artificial comprehension, which we have not yet. Calling what we have now AGI is sycophant talk.

throwa356262

6 hours ago

We maybe need an AGI level harness and an AGI level model to get there and we currently only have one of those?

ozozozd

5 hours ago

They said AGI is here. What you are describing is RSI.

/s

grim_io

6 hours ago

Uhuh, sure. We are holding the AGI wrong.

ozozozd

5 hours ago

Always. Folks even believe all of us including themselves are holding it wrong.

Kind of like how we all fail to see the bearded guy in the sky.

puelocesar

4 hours ago

Exactly, sometimes when reading Hacker News I get the impression this thing is a cult. Luckily there's still some dissident voice around to keep it interesting

surgical_fire

4 hours ago

Pi is a great harness because you can customize it with the building blocks that make sense for you.

I think that harnesses for LLMs are as important as IDEs for languages.

Xunxi

5 hours ago

Interesting! Pretty clean UI.

Captcha had me ruffled at the onset as I am slightly visually impaired and couldn't pick out the somewhat grainy images. It seems to be the standard now.

proc0

5 hours ago

Anyone know if this works with local models or only the APIs for DeepSeek? I'm assuming it's with the API, but I'm looking for cutting edge local harnesses.

JamesMcMinn

5 hours ago

It works fine with local models. I have it pointing at my strix halo running Qwen3.8 Flash Next, for example.

lazyjones

an hour ago

Did you manage to get it to search local files too, like the default integration does? Would appreciate a pointer (trying with ollama + Qwen/Nemo).

barcoder

5 hours ago

It's normally best to use the harness for the specific model. However, I found Cline is good with various models

maelito

5 hours ago

I'm sorry, what is a harness, compared to a complete Web LLm "chat" like Mistral Vibe ?

SyneRyder

4 hours ago

If you're using Mistral Vibe installed on your computer, that is a harness. Vibe is one of many AI harnesses.

In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)

It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.

maelito

4 hours ago

Mistral Vibe lets you use GLM-5.3 by default now. So it's a very capable model, for a cheap monthly fee. The Web version is excellent : tried yesterday on a simple search, results were way more informative than ChatGPT.

But yes, it's sad that they don't release models anymore.

Thanks for the definition !

phillc73

an hour ago

I've been with Mistral for a while now. Their hosted GLM-5.3 has been a game changer in Vibe CLI over the last couple of weeks. The Vibe CLI harness has been improving for a while, but is still a little sluggish and I feel lacks token minimisation strategies. I recently changed to Maki and have been reasonably satisfied so far.

However, I also use the Mistral Vibe chat in my browser. I think they only switched to GLM-3.5 here a couple of days ago (https://docs.mistral.ai/resources/changelogs). It'd be nice if Mistral had a desktop client, but I have Goose installed which I have no real complaints about.

233mhz

5 hours ago

The whole thing around the model that handles system prompt, skills, agents, cache, etc. For example codex, claude code, pi, oh-my-pi, ...

flohofwoe

3 hours ago

They should probably ask Deepseek to optimize their webpage first before attempting to tackle the desktop...

The webpage is a completely unusable stuttery mess on my Android phone (at most 5fps).

blain

6 hours ago

How can website be this slow, i can barelly scroll down on mobile.

Jeeetendra

2 hours ago

honestly the harness around the model matters more than the model now. curious how much of this is just a nicer wrapper

d2kx

3 hours ago

It's amazing for a first (desktop) release

quyleanh

8 hours ago

DSH still in preview but works flawlessly. Update also very quick.

With the preview of official app, hope team will add remote connection soon.

throwa356262

6 hours ago

I wouldn't say flawlessly.

It currently does not work with Bun and it is somewhat complicated to run it in a remote docker container due to the its weird security model.

contravariant

5 hours ago

Maybe this is too late to ask, but what even is a harness?

metchio

5 hours ago

it's a wrapper around a model that actually executes commands from text input. Claude Code is an harness : the underlying model is Claude (with the version of your choice), Claude produce text output like `grep -in "error" server.log` , Claude Code actually execute the code in your shell and return the output to the model

vrganj

5 hours ago

In the olden days, this used to be called Command and Control malware and was indicative of a major security breach.

dude250711

4 hours ago

A true direct native distillation. The very cutting edge of AI.

jdw64

5 hours ago

very nice harness! good code

cpursley

5 hours ago

No rustie, no installie. Got enough bloat electron and node bloat, already.

ElProlactin

8 hours ago

I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.

A marketplace, where the different intelligence agencies could evaluate the value of my digital stuff and then offer me something (like a $5 gift card to Olive Garden), would be really nice.

postsantum

8 hours ago

Yes! A real marketplace of ideas with automatic matching, like you can see who has the same ideas as you

Reminds me of some magic device from childrens book, don't remember its name, was like a glass ball where you could see what other people are up to

TeMPOraL

5 hours ago

Yeah, I know that one, but I actually looked into one and found nothing interesting. Mostly a bunch of paranoid people obsessed with "intelligence agencies" constantly looking through their sock drawers, as if spooks had literally nothing better to do with their time.

throwawayqqq11

6 hours ago

In the gemini thread, there was someone (rightfully) impressed, how it gdb'ed onto a kernel module and debugged iouring. All the harnisses i used ran atleast an ACL away from private files and juicy capabilities. Wtf is happening in the community?

itgoon

5 hours ago

Not that long ago, the joke was about grandparents installing every available toolbar into IE and getting hacked because "oh, neat! I want that!" without thinking about it.

noduerme

5 hours ago

Teacher of mine spent almost 20 years getting access to his FBI file through FOIA requests. Apparently it was surprising how much of his life they didn't know about.

Children with no life have never had anything worth keeping private. Even the question of having nothing to hide is foreign if you've never done anything at all.

It's like that parable about God giving us free will. If or when the intelligence agencies manage to create a generation with nothing to hide, what will their purpose be? You might as well take field notes on birds or sheep.

kkarpkkarp

5 hours ago

> I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.

oh, good old times of PRISM, rightly bygone. Of course they don't do this now.

kvirani

8 hours ago

I don't get it

rapind

7 hours ago

I think they’re saying they would rather use Muse or Dots.

TeMPOraL

5 hours ago

Deep inside they're realizing that the whole privacy thing is overblown obsession, and nobody actually cares about their data, and they wish someone did, but clearly no one does, not even $5 gift card for everything there is to know about one.

npn

7 hours ago

He thinks his ideas are still valuable and wants to sell them somehow.

Sabinus

5 hours ago

How comfortable are you sending a copy of every AI session transcript you generate to: 1) Me 2) The Chinese government 3) The US government

Quothling

5 hours ago

Being Danish I'd probably rate it China > you > US. Realistically though, I'm probably sending everything to everyone except for you.

I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.

thenthenthen

5 hours ago

I live in China, they already have everything, especially when using appl products. It is basically mandatory here since privacy is a completely different concept here (not sure its even a concept here tbh. Although there are some privacy laws)

TeMPOraL

5 hours ago

Totally.

Why the fuck would I care? The spooks definitely won't. I'm one person on a planet of 8 billion.

I think people don't appreciate the scale of that. A person is like a pixel on a 4k screen, in a wall that's made of many screens (about 5 in case of my country, about 42 in case of the US). Nobody cares what the single pixel does. It's not even visible unless it's so broken it doesn't change the same way surrounding pixels do.

I have a feeling that all this privacy obsession is actually a reaction to the unconscious feeling of irrelevance at this scale. In their minds, people defy the fact they're just sand for the systems of modern civilization - no, they are the very special ones, each fancies themselves a player among billions of NPCs, and to prove their uniqueness and specialness, they want to hide that fact from other NPCs, and get annoyed at the notion the world may indeed discover they are special.

Nothing else makes sense. Not in the west at least, where the only realistic threat from loss of privacy is getting weirder ads (hint: a real power move is to start with ad blocking and removing ads - and ad-infested media sources - from your life).

Now, loss of control over your daily life and your computing devices, that's another story. But most people don't seem to care about those.

ElProlactin

4 hours ago

Not really. But if I had a choice, I'd prefer that I get a third of an appetizer at Olive Garden rather than Zuck et. al. getting all the cheddar.

Is that really too much to ask for?

Bluestein

7 hours ago

Facebook? (But they get the money ...)

noduerme

5 hours ago

Your documents are worth endless breadsticks as long as you keep making new ones, puny human

tobi_bsf

7 hours ago

The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)

cheonic4040

7 hours ago

> The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)

So will western countries.

At least chinese offers 95% of the quality at 10% of the price.

Shin--

7 hours ago

I installed it on my laptop and it immediately vanished. I am sure Xi is browsing the hard drive right now.

smitty1110

7 hours ago

Just put your trust in Big Winnie and all will be fine.

Drupon

6 hours ago

>The chinese

You guys at Langley get Columbus Day off or did they go woke up there

Kuyawa

8 hours ago

The original title was "DeepSeek Harness Desktop app for MacOS and Windows"

This new title says nothing, we already know deepseek harness from before, this is a new product, an installable app worth differentiating from just "DeepSeek Harness"

nezhar

6 hours ago

Thanks, was wondering why this is in the feed.

webXL

8 hours ago

Sigh. Yet another harness...

I'd probably check it out if it was actually called 'YAH Harness' and not [insert Chinese AI lab here] Harness

Zambyte

7 hours ago

You don't have to use it. I don't use it. I still think it's really cool, and I've been thinking of trying to take ideas from it and integrate it into my own workflow. In particular, the session visualization tooling.

djriley

6 hours ago

You can use it to write a plug-in to change the name to YAH Harness!

jamienk

8 hours ago

My suspicion is that getting a big binary with full permissions is the goal here. Harnesses will only run their companion models and will demand your Contacts list.

neya

8 hours ago

> I'm DeepSeek Harness, an open-source harness from DeepSeek built on Cordis's “everything is a plugin” architecture.

accountrequired

7 hours ago

The binaries are from china. Your data goes to china. The self-updating plugin system is vulnerable to malicious llm provider. Anyone using this is crazy!

Sha1rholder

6 hours ago

It's open source. Unlike Claude Code your beloved friend which is closed-source and uses steganography along with an astonishing array of telemetry and fingerprinting techniques to conduct intelligence analysis on its users.

yjh0502

6 hours ago

As a non-American, I see handing my data to an American company as potentially just as risky as handing it to a Chinese company.

latentsea

6 hours ago

Well under the current US administration as non-US citizens we kinda feel this sentiment about the US now fwiw.

jluysvi

6 hours ago

Ahh! Not China! Real Americans™ let their data go to American™ companies!

wg0

5 hours ago

The new danger is US administration and the current fascit regime. China has yet not topple a single government abroad, has not bombed a single country and has not tapped the phones of its allies.

Now don't down vote before understanding the definition of a fasict:

"A fascist is a person who advocates for or adheres to fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology."

China is none of that.

sampullman

7 hours ago

What if I use it in an isolated environment and only work on open source code with it?

qurren

6 hours ago

> Your data goes to china.

What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.

harvey9

6 hours ago

No jurisdiction but their operatives have global reach. For most people the more practical risk for any rented ai is IP theft.

wickedsight

5 hours ago

Exactly. Meanwhile, nearly all my personal data is stored on servers owned by US companies. Feels much more risky.

edelhans

3 hours ago

I strongly prefer China having access to my personal data than the US.

bedane

6 hours ago

better this than three-letter agencies from some nazi warmongering alternative

glenpierce

6 hours ago

Is there a safer alternative? It’s not like I can trust OpenAI since they’ve proven that they’ll steal research from mathematicians. X is run by a sociopath. Anthropic is going to IPO so who can say how long they’ll be trustworthy…

gizmodo59

17 minutes ago

Excited to try this!

Codex (ChatGPT desktop app) is truly the best in class when it comes to apps!

juujian

14 minutes ago

I, too, enjoy CocaCola™ for its natural flavors and smooth mouthfeel...