Plugin Positioning

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) is an agent development framework based on plugins. The default Agent presets (standard / cordis / code / minimal) use English system prompts. Since DeepSeek is a model native to Chinese, using English prompts causes the model to first internally translate Chinese questions into English for reasoning, and then translate the output back into Chinese. This adds an extra layer of translation overhead and may lead to distortion in tone or details. The dsh-presets-zh plugin provides localized Chinese translations of these four presets and loads them automatically based on locale.

Core Features

This plugin mainly provides the following capabilities:

  1. Four Chinese presets: It provides four Chinese presets: standard-zh, cordis-zh, code-zh, and minimal-zh, each a line-for-line translation of the corresponding upstream English version.
  2. Automatic loading by locale: The plugin reads the host’s settings.locale.preference setting. If it is set to Chinese, new sessions default to standard-zh; switching back to an English locale automatically restores the original behavior.
  3. Preserving user-created work: Chinese presets are rewritten only if the user has not edited them and the preset suite is upgraded. Presets already edited by the user are never modified, following the host’s “copy into a new preset before editing” rule.
  4. Clear translation scope: It translates only user-visible narrative text and instructions, without modifying structural lines such as tool names, plugin names, or !!js expressions. The accompanying skill content in cordis-zh (such as editing-cordis-compositions and cordis-plugin-development) remains in the original English.

Installation and Activation

It has not been published to npm yet and must be installed directly from GitHub. Run the following command to add the plugin to the Web profile:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:GongYuanCaiJi/dsh-presets-zh

After installation, newly opened sessions will automatically apply the corresponding Chinese preset based on the current locale (defaulting to standard-zh). Sessions that are already open retain their originally selected preset and will not switch automatically.

Usage

In the DeepSeek Harness UI, the preset selector displays options such as cordis-zh, code-zh, and minimal-zh (an ID ending with -zh indicates a Chinese version). Click one to apply the corresponding Chinese preset.

Notes

  1. Chinese skill names are not supported: The host module @deepseek-ai/dsh-skill enforces a regular-expression restriction on skill names (^[a-z0-9]+(?:-[a-z0-9]+)*$), which cannot be modified at the plugin layer. Therefore, Chinese skill names are not supported.
  2. Host system prompts are not translated: The harness:identity line in the host (for example, “You are an AI agent powered by DeepSeek Harness.”) is part of the host system prompt and is not included in these four preset files, so it is not translated.
  3. License: This plugin ports content from the upstream deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness (MIT); the license is MIT.

Conclusion

By providing localized system prompts, this plugin aims to make DeepSeek’s reasoning more natural in Chinese contexts and reduce detail loss caused by language conversion. To view the source code or submit feedback, visit the GitHub repository.