Introduction

In the DeepSeek Harness (DSH) workflow, directly asking an agent for its “view” usually only produces a single-dimensional conclusion. Without external pressure, the agent tends to look for evidence supporting its initial position, leaving the conclusion insufficiently adversarial.

dsh-debate addresses this by introducing a formal debate mechanism. It breaks a question into two adversarial subagents, “pro” and “con.” Each subagent researches independently and participates in the debate, after which the main agent renders a verdict based on the debate record.

Plugin Positioning

dsh-debate is a workflow plugin for DeepSeek Harness. Its core value is shifting agents from “self-statement” to “adversarial argumentation.”

  • Maintainer: shlouai
  • License: MIT
  • Positioning: Addresses the single-perspective limitation of agent answers through adversarial subagents.

Core Features

The plugin provides three core tools to control the debate process and packages the debate results into Web UI cards.

  1. debate_open: Starts a debate. It fixes the motion and round count, and returns a debate_id.
  2. debate_round: Executes one debate round. The sequence is: a fresh FOR subagent speaks first, followed by an AGAINST subagent that rebuts based on the preceding context.
  3. debate_verdict: Renders the verdict. The main agent reviews the debate round by round, gives the final outcome (pro/con/draw) and rationale, and closes the debate.

Key Capabilities

  • Adversarial subagents: The pro and con sides are independent subagents that cannot see each other and focus on winning the debate.
  • Research capability: The default toolset includes read, glob, grep, web_search, and web_fetch, supporting verification of codebases or web information.
  • Read-only enforcement: By design, no tool can write files or execute commands during the debate.
  • Graceful degradation: If some tools are unavailable in the deployment environment (for example, web search credentials are not configured), they are removed from the tool list and logged instead of crashing the debate.
  • Zero footprint: Installed as a bundle, it does not modify DeepSeek Harness source code or the installation directory.
  • Web UI cards: Supports display as collapsible cards in the Web UI, and card state is restored after a page refresh.

Installation and Enablement

The plugin can be installed directly into the web profile using the official command.

dsh plugin --profile web add @shlouai/dsh-debate

Prerequisites:
* The Node.js version must be ^22.19 or >=24.
* Install pnpm.

Typical Usage

After installation, start the profile and enter a natural-language instruction to trigger the debate.

dsh --profile web

Enter the following in the interaction:

Debate whether we should replace our REST API with gRPC. Two rounds.

The plugin automatically splits the task into two subagents for two rounds of debate, and the main agent gives the final verdict.

Design and Limitations

  • Environment dependency: The plugin depends on a DeepSeek Harness source checkout (unless the plugin is located in a sibling directory of the harness).
  • Tool dependency: The debate tools depend on base tools such as read, glob, grep, web_search, and web_fetch.
  • UI limitation: The card is available only in the Web UI, but the tools themselves still work in Headless mode.

References

  • GitHub repository: https://github.com/shlouai/dsh-debate
  • Plugin directory: https://www.skillhub.cn/plugins/shlouai/dsh-debate