Introduction

The plugin ecosystem of DeepSeek Harness (DSH) allows feature extension, but the original DSH lacks native, global scheduling and audit mechanisms. In existing practice, automation tasks are usually bound to a specific chat Session, which leads to session reuse, makes it difficult to track history across Workspaces, and leaves no unified management entry point.

dsh-automation-center is a Root-level automation center that provides DeepSeek Harness with schedulable and auditable automation task management. Each trigger creates a new root Agent and Result Session in the specified Workspace. Task definitions, schedules, permissions, and run history are managed by the plugin, while full results and traces are stored in separate Sessions.

Core Capabilities

This plugin primarily addresses three problems: scheduling, session isolation, and permission management.

Scheduling and Session Isolation

  1. Schedule support: Supports one-time, fixed interval, daily, and weekly schedules. The interface provides IANA timezone configuration and next run preview.
  2. Separate Sessions: Each run (occurrence) creates a new root Agent and Session and does not reuse existing chat sessions.
  3. Result archiving: Result Sessions use the automation task name as the title instead of the Workspace or project name, making them easier to find.

Permissions and Model Policy

  1. Unattended permissions: Provides two permission modes: “Read-only” and “Workspace writable”.
  2. Model selection: Each task can choose “inherit the DSH default model at runtime” or fix provider, model, and reasoning effort. The system records the actual model in run history.
  3. Health checks: Checks Workspace, Preset, and model before saving and before running; unavailable targets are displayed as blocked, avoiding the creation of invalid Sessions.

Stability and Audit

  1. Scheduling mechanism: Provides an idempotent, non-overlapping, deterministic occurrence claim mechanism, together with bounded misfire compensation and a conservative Host restart recovery strategy.
  2. Lifecycle: Jobs go through claim / setup / executing / settling / delivery stages, including lease heartbeats and timeout control.
  3. Status feedback: Provides expected/admitted/claimed/queue/progress health states, as well as structured Outcome/Attention, attempt, and side-effect uncertainty.
  4. Persistence: All write operations return a durable Receipt (request ID, revision, committed/rejected/unknown), and the result is then confirmed by reading the authoritative state.
  5. Git integration: Optional isolated Git worktree review mode, supporting patch hash/stat and accept/keep/discard operations, and failing closed when the source workspace drifts.

Installation and Activation

The current version is 0.1.0-alpha.8. Before installing, ensure the DSH version is between 0.1.0-rc.8 and 0.1.2-alpha.2, and the Node.js version is ^22.19.0 or >=24.0.0.

  1. Download the plugin package dsh-automation-center-0.1.0-alpha.8.tgz.
  2. Run the following commands in a terminal to install:
dsh plugin --profile web add ./dsh-automation-center-0.1.0-alpha.8.tgz
dsh plugin --profile desktop add ./dsh-automation-center-0.1.0-alpha.8.tgz

After installation, fully exit and reopen DSH to ensure the Host Bundle is mounted correctly at startup.

Usage Workflow

After installing and restarting DSH, you can create and manage automation tasks using the following steps:

  1. Open “Settings → Automation” or find the “Automation” entry in the left sidebar.
  2. Click “New Automation” or “Create your first automation”.
  3. Fill in the required information: name, task instructions, target Workspace, schedule (type, frequency, timezone), Agent Preset, model policy, permissions, and timeout settings.
  4. Check “Next Run Preview” and save the configuration.
  5. Wait for the scheduled trigger, or click “Run Now” directly.
  6. View the summary in the “Recent Runs” list, then click the corresponding entry to open the Result Session and view the full result.

It is recommended to first verify the configuration with “Read-only” permissions, and enable Workspace write permissions after it has been confirmed to work correctly.

Notes

  1. Conflict detection: If the old @dsh-external/dsh_automation plugin is running, the new plugin will report AUTOMATION_PLUGIN_CONFLICT. Disable or remove the old plugin first.
  2. Cancellation limitations: Cancellation can only terminate subsequent execution and cannot roll back side effects that have already been completed.
  3. Security boundaries: Logs and RPC errors must not output Prompt, Token, environment variables, or credentials. Unattended tools use a whitelist and reject background process escapes.
  4. Identity: Runs expose a stable identity composed of Definition revision, occurrence, and Workspace scope, and recovery is not based on list position.

Directory