Introduction¶

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) uses a plugin-based architecture, allowing developers to extend its capabilities as needed. When building complex agents, a common requirement is to let the model perform self-review and path-validity verification during runtime while retaining control of the main workflow. The dsh-deliberation plugin provides this mechanism.

Overview¶

dsh-deliberation is a plugin designed for DeepSeek Harness and maintained by fly1989. It primarily addresses self-review and path validation during an agent’s reasoning process, allowing the primary control flow to initiate deliberation or request masked review without requiring the primary model to decide whether to trust the output.

Core Features¶

The plugin provides the following core capabilities:

• Primary-controlled deliberation: The primary control flow explicitly calls a tool to initiate deliberation, rather than relying on the model to decide at random.
• Opt-in reasoning-masked review: Masks the reasoning process and audits by examining only action outcomes.
• deliberate tool: Runs restricted alternative, audit, or masked-review subprocesses.
• automatic masked review: An optional automatic masked review feature.

Installation and Enablement¶

Installing this plugin requires a Node.js environment (22.19+ or 24+) and pnpm. DSH plugin installation commands are automatically forwarded to pnpm. The installation command is:

npx @deepseek-ai/dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-deliberation@0.1.0

After installing or updating the plugin, restart the running Web process for changes to take effect.

Typical Usage¶

Manually invoking deliberation
The model still needs to decide whether to call the deliberate tool. For testing, you can guide it with a prompt such as the following:
1. First use read-only tools to collect specific observations.
2. Call deliberate, opening a trajectory-audit branch and a masked-review branch on the most recently completed step.
3. The subprocess returns a compact JSON package, and the primary controller decides the next step based on the results.

Enabling automatic masked review
Automatic review is disabled by default. It can be enabled through an application configuration patch. Example configuration (see examples/auto-review.patch.yml):

autoReview:
  enabled: true
  scope: tool-bearing-turns
  provider: mid-fork-current-turn

Use Cases and Caveats¶

Role definitions
The plugin defines three deliberation roles:
* independent-alternative: Searches for different mechanisms or strategies.
* trajectory-audit: Validates the current trajectory and identifies the earliest suspicious decision.
* masked-review: Re-reads observable actions and outcomes without looking at the reasoning process.

Notes
* Status: Currently in experimental preview. Paired benchmark data have not yet established correctness or cost advantages, so automatic review is disabled by default.
* Permissions: Subprocesses never vote, select a winner, or replace the primary controller.
* Certainty: Certainty is self-reported by the subprocess, not verified as fact.
* Configuration mechanism: DSH patch lines replace the entire configuration of the target line and do not perform deep merging.

Short Conclusion¶

dsh-deliberation provides DSH with controllable deliberation and review capabilities. It is suitable for developers who need runtime safety checks or path validation. For more details, see the Plugin catalog or the GitHub repository.