dsh-backstory

When you stare at unfamiliar code, git blame tells you who wrote a line and when, but not what it actually does or why it exists. dsh-backstory closes that gap by asking every line its backstory and answering with grounded, source-tracked what and why.

Under the hood it runs a three-layer provenance engine. A content-hash ledger records every write or edit along with text fingerprints of the touched lines, so attribution survives line-number drift. Commit trailers fold DSH-Turn and DSH-Prompt metadata into git history, letting git blame recover semantic origin for free. A live session log covers the current turn before anything is persisted. All three degrade gracefully, and the tool always returns at least the source lines. Explanations are cached per content hash so unchanged lines never trigger a repeat model call, and prompts written to the ledger or trailers are automatically redacted for common secrets, tokens, and Bearer headers.

It is built for developers who frequently inherit code written by teammates or by AI agents, and for any MCP client user who wants semantic-level provenance layered on top of plain git history, with or without DeepSeek Harness running.