The core design of DeepSeek Harness (DSH) revolves around agent conversations and workspaces, making it suitable for complex agent development and debugging. However, in daily use, developers may only need a pure chat window and do not want to bind it to agent context, tools, or system prompts. The # dsh-standalone-chat plugin is designed to solve this pain point.

This is a standalone, lightweight chat plugin that provides multi-turn conversation, streaming output, and conversation history management (automatic titles, renaming, and deletion) for the DSH Web interface. It is fully decoupled from DSH’s agent conversation and workspace logic, and stores data under a dedicated path.

Core Features

Navigation and Routing
The plugin adds a standalone Chat entry in the bottom action area of the sidebar and provides two routes: /chat and /chat/:conversationId, supporting direct refresh or navigating directly to a specific conversation via a link.

Conversation Experience
It supports token-by-token streaming output over SSE, and the reasoning process can be displayed in a collapsible view. Conversation history supports creating new conversations, automatic titles (taken from the first message), renaming, and deletion.

Model Selection
A model dropdown grouped by provider is provided above the input box. If no conversation has started yet, the selected model becomes the initial model; switching models during a conversation is persisted immediately. If no selection is made, it falls back to DSH’s default model.

Interface and Data
The interface reuses DSH’s official MarkdownText component and design tokens. For regular chat sessions, project_id is set to null, and no system prompts, tools, skills, or workspace context are included. Conversation data is persistently stored in ~/.dsh/storages/chat. and follows DSH’s current language settings.

Installation and Activation

Install by running the following command in PowerShell:

$dshBin = Join-Path $env:USERPROFILE '.dsh\profiles\node_modules\@deepseek-ai\dsh\lib\bin.js'
node $dshBin plugin --profile web add 'https://github.com/ZoeHao2026/dsh-standalone-chat.git'

After installation is complete, restart DSH and perform a hard refresh in the browser. You can then see the standalone Chat entry at the bottom of the sidebar.

Typical Usage

  1. Start a conversation through the standalone Chat entry at the bottom of the sidebar.
  2. Select a model by provider above the input box; if no selection is made, the DSH default model is used.
  3. Conversation data is automatically saved in ~/.dsh/storages/chat. and supports viewing history, renaming, and deletion.

Applicable Scenarios and Notes

This plugin is currently fully validated against the baseline of DSH 0.1.1-rc.2, the Web platform, and Node.js 22 or later. The plugin code uses the MIT License. After uninstalling the plugin, saved conversation data remains in ~/.dsh/storages/chat. and is not automatically deleted.