Preface

The philosophy of DSH (DeepSeek Harness) is “everything is a plugin.” Authoring and maintaining skills is a core workflow for building agents. During authoring, frontmatter conventions, skill trigger surfaces, length control, and behavioral validation are common pain points. The dsh-skill-authoring plugin addresses skill authoring, review, and validation by packaging a set of standardized skills into the DSH plugin system.

Plugin Overview

This is a DSH plugin. When installed, it registers the package’s skills/ directory as a skill root. This means the skill is placed into the agent’s skill directory together with the plugin.

Core Capabilities

The skill provided by the plugin covers the following dimensions:

  1. frontmatter Conventions
    Defines required / optional fields, valid syntax for boolean fields, and the mechanism by which a single character mistake can cause a skill to disappear silently.

  2. Skill Roots and Precedence
    Explains the scan order for ranks 100–600, how a skill with the same name can override a user-level root at a project-level root, and the level of coverage for change detection.

  3. Writing Descriptions to Define Trigger Surfaces
    Explains why only the description enters the model’s visibility, how to stack trigger cues, and how to write boundaries and fallbacks.

  4. Length and Splitting
    Guides keeping a skill within the target range of 300–500 lines, clarifies when to split content into references/, and when not to force splitting just to meet a number.

  5. Static Validation
    Provides the scripts/check-skill.js script to check frontmatter, required fields, file references, internal anchors, §N cross-references, and length in one pass. The script can accept a skill directory or a skill root directory and supports --json.

  6. Behavioral Validation
    Demonstrates how to run an A/B comparison of performing the same task with and without the skill, how to compare outputs rather than self-reports, and which disciplines should be hard-coded when spawning sub-agents.

Installation and Enabling

In the DSH environment, run the following command to install the plugin. After installation, the skills/ directory in the package will be registered as a skill root.

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-skill-authoring

Typical Usage

The static validation script is a zero-dependency Node script and can be run directly outside DSH.

node skills/dsh-skill-authoring/scripts/check-skill.js <技能目录>

Notes

  • This plugin runs with the permissions of the current DSH process. Inspect the source code and license before installing.
  • scripts/package.json specifies type as commonjs for compatibility with module package environments, ensuring the script runs correctly inside the package.