Introduction

DeepSeek Harness Companion is a lightweight plugin that runs inside DeepSeek Harness Web. It converts the current session’s activity state, context pressure, and usage information into a “Living Data Orb,” helping developers quickly understand the Agent’s runtime status and resource consumption at a glance.

The plugin is designed around the principle of “state first, usage on demand.” The default interface conveys only what the Agent is doing (state) and whether the context requires attention (pressure). Detailed numeric metrics are shown only when hovering, keyboard-focusing, or clicking the pinned panel. This design prevents data from continuously demanding attention while ensuring privacy and security.

Core Features

The plugin is natively mounted into DSH Web through shell.overlay and provides the following core capabilities:

  • Activity State Monitoring: Recognizes states such as Sleeping, Idle, Working, Waiting, and Done, helping determine whether the Agent is executing normally or waiting for user response.
  • Context Pressure Visualization: Displays estimated context utilization across four levels—Normal, Attention, Warning, and Unknown. Below 70% is Normal, while above 85% is Warning.
  • Usage Panel: Shows metrics including Context, Billed input, Output, Cache hit, and Steps. The data is taken directly from projections provided by DSH.
  • Living Data Orb: Uses emojis and lightweight animations to express states without relying on color as the sole indicator.
  • Privacy First: Does not read or send prompts, messages, reasoning processes, tool parameters or results, file contents, credentials, or vendor account information.
  • Interaction and Integration: Supports dragging to reposition, collapsing into an edge label, and following the lifecycle of the currently selected session.

Installation and Activation

The plugin is published through the official plugin catalog and requires a restart of the Web client after installation.

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-companion
dsh web

Usage

After installation, the plugin appears in the Web interface as a “pet,” with the following interaction logic:

  1. View Usage: Hover over the pet or focus it using the keyboard to open the usage panel and show specific values for Context, Billed input, Output, and so on.
  2. Pin the Panel: Click the pet to pin or unpin the usage panel for continuous monitoring.
  3. Move the Position: Hold and drag the pet to change its on-screen position (the position is saved locally in the browser).
  4. Collapse and Restore: Click the collapse function, and the pet shrinks into the Show DSH Companion label at the edge of the screen. Click the label to restore it to its original state.

Notes and Limitations

dsh-companion is currently in MVP stage and has the following limitations:

  • Version and Compatibility: The current version (0.1.1) is specifically targeted at DeepSeek Harness 0.1.0-rc.5. Because Harness is still in developer preview, later versions may require plugin updates for compatibility.
  • Session Limitation: Version 0.1.0 supports only the DSH Web interface and the currently selected session, without support for concurrent multiple sessions or multiple pets.
  • Privacy Boundary: The plugin only reads session state and projections already provided by the DSH Web client. When projection data is missing, metrics remain Unknown or are omitted directly; unknown data is never estimated as 0.
  • Missing Features: Streaming token estimation, price or cost calculation, historical trends, growth systems, prompt/tool content analysis, and cloud synchronization are not yet supported.

Conclusion

DSH Companion is suitable for DSH users who need to continuously monitor Agent status and context usage during daily development. It balances “state visibility” and “usage monitoring” through minimal visual feedback while strictly adhering to privacy principles and never touching conversation content or reasoning processes. The project code and documentation are hosted on GitHub, where users can build it as needed or consult the materials.