Introduction

DeepSeek Harness (DSH) supports managing skills through configuration files or .zip packages, but the official toolchain lacks controls for enabling, disabling, and deleting skills. With the current approach, developers usually need to manually edit files to hide or disable skills, which is cumbersome and error-prone. The dsh-skill-manage plugin completes this missing loop for DSH by providing a visual settings panel and a tool interface that agents can call directly.

Plugin Overview

This is a client-side plugin for DeepSeek Harness (dsh), maintained by the developer lijian-ui. It allows users to view, enable, disable, and delete skills in the settings panel, or import new skills through .zip files. It also registers an agent tool named skill_manage, which supports creating, modifying, or deleting skill files programmatically during a session.

Core Features

This plugin implements the following core capabilities:

  1. Skill list and search: Displays skills grouped by global or workspace scope, with search filtering support.
  2. Enable/disable control: Provides toggle switches that take effect in real time without restarting the application.
  3. Delete skill: Permanently removes skill files through a confirmation dialog.
  4. Add skill: Supports uploading .zip archives, automatically extracts them, and installs them into the global skills directory.
  5. Skill details: Renders skill content as Markdown and displays the front-matter metadata table.
  6. Agent tool skill_manage: A tool that LLMs can call directly, supporting create, modify, and delete operations, with a specified scope (global or workspace).

Installation and Activation

Installing this plugin requires DSH version >= 0.1.6-alpha.1.

  1. Make sure your DSH Web app or official desktop app has been updated to the version above.
  2. Run the installation command. Note that the --profile parameter is used to distinguish between the Web and desktop environments; plugins are isolated by profile.
dsh plugin --profile web add @lijian-ui/dsh-skill-manage

After installation, restart the DSH application to load the plugin.

Typical Usage

1. Through the Settings Panel

After installation, open DSH (Web or desktop) and go to Settings → Skill Manage.

  • Enable/Disable: Click the toggle on a skill card to switch between the “enabled” and “disabled” states. The plugin implements this logic by renaming SKILL.md to SKILL.md.disabled, so DSH’s official file-scanning mechanism ignores that file.
  • Delete: Click the delete button and confirm to remove the skill.
  • View details: Click a skill card to view its rendered Markdown content and metadata.
  • Search and import: Use the search box to filter skills, then click “Add skill” and select a .zip archive to import it.

2. Through the Agent Tool

In a DSH agent session, an LLM can call the skill_manage tool to perform programmatic operations. The tool parameters are as follows:

Parameter Type Required Description
action create | modify | delete Yes The type of operation to perform
name string Yes Skill name (lowercase letters, digits, and hyphens only)
description string create only Skill description
when_to_use string No Trigger conditions for the skill
content string create only Skill body (Markdown format)
scope global | workspace No (global by default) Scope: global writes to ~/.dsh/skills, workspace writes to the project directory
  • delete: Reuses the deletion logic from the GUI.
  • workspace scope: The plugin traverses upward from the current session’s working directory to locate the project root containing a .git directory, then writes the skill to <project>/.dsh/skills.

Use Cases and Notes

  • Version compatibility: Plugin version 0.2.0 includes breaking changes. The RPC protocol has been aligned with the official create factory, and dependencies have been moved to peerDependencies. If your environment uses an older dsh-desktop 0.5.0, there may be compatibility issues.
  • Profile isolation: The Web and desktop environments are two separate profiles. After installation, the plugin is visible only to the currently active profile (web or desktop).
  • Permissions and security: The plugin runs with the permissions of the current DSH process and reads/writes skill files. It is recommended to review the source code and confirm the license before installation.

Summary

dsh-skill-manage addresses a core pain point in DSH skill management by converting operations that previously required manual file editing into intuitive UI interactions and standard LLM tool calls. For developers who need fine-grained control over skill workflows or who want agents to deploy skills automatically, this is a practical tool.