dsh-remote-development

DeepSeek Harness agents were confined to the local filesystem: reading files, running commands, searching with ripgrep — all on the machine you sit in front of. Pointing the agent at a project on a remote server meant manually SSHing in, shuttling files back and forth, and losing the very automation that made an agent useful. dsh-remote-development closes that gap with a thin routing layer: register an SSH machine in the Web GUI, pick a remote directory as the session workspace, and the same file, shell, and search tools the model already knows about transparently execute on the far end over SSH. No new model-facing tools are added; the working directory simply becomes the remote path.

Under the hood, three routing providers swap in for the sandbox filesystem, subprocess runtime, and Bash executor. Paths that resolve under a remote root are served through a single shared SFTP subsystem channel per machine — one multiplexed session instead of a channel per call, staying within server-side connection caps. Spawns ride an SSH exec channel; background jobs get a real remote PID managed via a process-group kill protocol. Writes are serialised per file and published atomically (temp file plus rename) with the same permission checks and error codes as the local sandbox. Host keys follow TOFU by default: the first key is recorded, a changed key is rejected as a potential MITM, and verify or off modes are available per machine. Anchor directories are lightweight metadata folders under $DSH_HOME; any path that does not pass through an anchor keeps normal local behaviour, so existing sessions are completely unaffected.

The plugin is aimed at developers and ops engineers who want their agent to work directly on remote build servers, development machines, or jump-host environments without deploying a second IDE or a third-party UI plugin. The SSH stack (ssh2 and its pure-JS dependencies) is bundled at build time, so no C++ toolchain or build-script approval is needed at install — any Linux or macOS profile can add it and restart. Windows remote hosts, persistent terminal sessions, and @ file references are explicitly deferred to later phases.