This page doesn't emphasize the cordis architecture [1], but that's the most exciting thing about this -- not just yet another harness. It has the potential to make this into something like the emacs of harnesses! I think this might be particularly potent for long-running agents.
I just installed DeepSeek Harness for MacOS and it's a beast. The same great harness as before but now is an app you just click on your dock to run
All settings and workspaces are transferred so you don't lose anything, the only thing it lacks is a way to increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd - so I'll work on a plugin for that
I can't be happier
Edit: Asked DSH for a plugin to increase/decrease font and it delivered. Love it. Then asked for a plugin to ring a bell on questions and tasks finished, of course it delivered flawlessly. The same plugin architecture, extensible by the same AI
Most of this thread seems neutral/skeptical with just that post being obvious. On the other hand the volume of jev threads we have been seeing these past 2 weeks..
Do the same as I did, ask it to develop a plugin to increase/decrease font and you will see results in one single task, dsh-zoom as a plugin, restart and done
It has particularly good observability (the ability to see the full content of every prompt and response and tool call) compared to other harnesses, that's the main thing that stood out to me.
All LLMs work the same to a certain degree, it's a matter of personal preference, token cost and customization. I asked DSH to build a news aggregator for me and it built a really nice app from 30 news sources via rss feeds for less than 50 cents and presto, reading tech news has never been so gratifying
I feel like I live in another reality from others here; I read people saying things ‘while their jaws are hanging open’ (not said here literally but the feel is the same ; I see it in other threads on HN literally here though); why are we so chuffed with stuff that’s now been one shot for maybe already a year, but definitely the last 6 months? Literally everyone who tried LLMs know this and yet it seems a huge surprise to people here that it is so easy now? And that’s opposite of the people, also very much on HN, who say AI is shit at coding and will not replace humans because humans have to fix its bad code.
https://frontierharness.org/ allegedly this is on the Pareto frontier, though I don't know how good of a benchmark this really is. it seems to focus on one-shot type tasks, whereas the real utility of one harness over another seems to make itself known in long running tasks.
also this is a very limited static snapshot with one model as backend, I wish there were more consistently refreshed and diversified harness benchmarks.
i've seen "Pareto frontier" literally 500 thousand times in the last two weeks or so, and maybe once or twice before that. Can someone please explain what happened recently
Still in preview, but I think this update is only meant to simplify the installation process.
Not providing DSH as a simple to install package resulted in an unknown third party packaging it with some modifications and SEO the hell out of it to always come on top in Internet searches (even above DS):
deepseekharness[.]io
Could be just an ambitious engineer, but could equally easily be ran by cyber criminals or NSA.
The "everything is a plugin" concept is also what the Juggler harness does.
I'm not yet sure if it is really sensible long-term, but it is definitely now while we're still trying to figure out what exactly we want and need from LLMs and harnesses.
DeepSeek harness is the OpenCode (better than OpenCode) of the web/desktop medium.
Good things about it are that it is extremely lightweight and fast. The communication between sub agents is two way in that a sub agent can midway send a message to parent and the parent can send a message midway to change the course of action of a sub agent and while this is happening, you can sitll continue talking to the model on the main thread.
Downside of DeepSeek is that it is constantly in flux which is understandable and they make it very clear themselves that the breaking changes are to be expected.
Captcha had me ruffled at the onset as I am slightly visually impaired and couldn't pick out the somewhat grainy images. It seems to be the standard now.
Anyone know if this works with local models or only the APIs for DeepSeek? I'm assuming it's with the API, but I'm looking for cutting edge local harnesses.
If you're using Mistral Vibe installed on your computer, that is a harness. Vibe is one of many AI harnesses.
In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)
It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.
it's a wrapper around a model that actually executes commands from text input. Claude Code is an harness : the underlying model is Claude (with the version of your choice), Claude produce text output like `grep -in "error" server.log` , Claude Code actually execute the code in your shell and return the output to the model
I don't see much of a future for these kinds of intricate harnesses, or harnessing in general for that matter. As models are getting better, harnessing will shrink until they are at the level of vanilla Pi or not even that.
My version of this theory is that we already have AGI, but Altman/Amodei/Zuck keep asking it for an infinite money glitch and it keeps (correctly!) saying "no money, humanity is fucked given the trajectory, and you in particular will be fucked once the general public decides that you're the scapegoat". A/A/Z decides the AGI is wrong of course, so obviously dumping another billion into training or reinforcement or tagging or whatever is the next step.
agi is artificial general intelligence. sol5.6, astra, fable are already wildly more intelligent than the average person. we already have agi. however people need to keep the moving target so they have something to talk about, otherwise the voracious appetite for novelty will not be met.
what we don’t have yet are the tools to take full advantage of the agi we do have. they’re coming soon.
Exactly, sometimes when reading Hacker News I get the impression this thing is a cult. Luckily there's still some dissident voice around to keep it interesting
I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.
A marketplace, where the different intelligence agencies could evaluate the value of my digital stuff and then offer me something (like a $5 gift card to Olive Garden), would be really nice.
Teacher of mine spent almost 20 years getting access to his FBI file through FOIA requests. Apparently it was surprising how much of his life they didn't know about.
Children with no life have never had anything worth keeping private. Even the question of having nothing to hide is foreign if you've never done anything at all.
It's like that parable about God giving us free will. If or when the intelligence agencies manage to create a generation with nothing to hide, what will their purpose be? You might as well take field notes on birds or sheep.
Yeah, I know that one, but I actually looked into one and found nothing interesting. Mostly a bunch of paranoid people obsessed with "intelligence agencies" constantly looking through their sock drawers, as if spooks had literally nothing better to do with their time.
In the gemini thread, there was someone (rightfully) impressed, how it gdb'ed onto a kernel module and debugged iouring. All the harnisses i used ran atleast an ACL away from private files and juicy capabilities. Wtf is happening in the community?
Not that long ago, the joke was about grandparents installing every available toolbar into IE and getting hacked because "oh, neat! I want that!" without thinking about it.
Deep inside they're realizing that the whole privacy thing is overblown obsession, and nobody actually cares about their data, and they wish someone did, but clearly no one does, not even $5 gift card for everything there is to know about one.
Being Danish I'd probably rate it China > you > US. Realistically though, I'm probably sending everything to everyone except for you.
I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.
I live in China, they already have everything, especially when using appl products. It is basically mandatory here since privacy is a completely different concept here (not sure its even a concept here tbh. Although there are some privacy laws)
Why the fuck would I care? The spooks definitely won't. I'm one person on a planet of 8 billion.
I think people don't appreciate the scale of that. A person is like a pixel on a 4k screen, in a wall that's made of many screens (about 5 in case of my country, about 42 in case of the US). Nobody cares what the single pixel does. It's not even visible unless it's so broken it doesn't change the same way surrounding pixels do.
I have a feeling that all this privacy obsession is actually a reaction to the unconscious feeling of irrelevance at this scale. In their minds, people defy the fact they're just sand for the systems of modern civilization - no, they are the very special ones, each fancies themselves a player among billions of NPCs, and to prove their uniqueness and specialness, they want to hide that fact from other NPCs, and get annoyed at the notion the world may indeed discover they are special.
Nothing else makes sense. Not in the west at least, where the only realistic threat from loss of privacy is getting weirder ads (hint: a real power move is to start with ad blocking and removing ads - and ad-infested media sources - from your life).
Now, loss of control over your daily life and your computing devices, that's another story. But most people don't seem to care about those.
The original title was "DeepSeek Harness Desktop app for MacOS and Windows"
This new title says nothing, we already know deepseek harness from before, this is a new product, an installable app worth differentiating from just "DeepSeek Harness"
You don't have to use it. I don't use it. I still think it's really cool, and I've been thinking of trying to take ideas from it and integrate it into my own workflow. In particular, the session visualization tooling.
My suspicion is that getting a big binary with full permissions is the goal here. Harnesses will only run their companion models and will demand your Contacts list.
The binaries are from china. Your data goes to china. The self-updating plugin system is vulnerable to malicious llm provider. Anyone using this is crazy!
It's open source. Unlike Claude Code your beloved friend which is closed-source and uses steganography along with an astonishing array of telemetry and fingerprinting techniques to conduct intelligence analysis on its users.
The new danger is US administration and the current fascit regime. China has yet not topple a single government abroad, has not bombed a single country and has not tapped the phones of its allies.
Now don't down vote before understanding the definition of a fasict:
"A fascist is a person who advocates for or adheres to fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology."
Is there a safer alternative? It’s not like I can trust OpenAI since they’ve proven that they’ll steal research from mathematicians. X is run by a sociopath. Anthropic is going to IPO so who can say how long they’ll be trustworthy…
[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25512
All settings and workspaces are transferred so you don't lose anything, the only thing it lacks is a way to increase/decrease font size with cmd + and cmd - so I'll work on a plugin for that
I can't be happier
Edit: Asked DSH for a plugin to increase/decrease font and it delivered. Love it. Then asked for a plugin to ring a bell on questions and tasks finished, of course it delivered flawlessly. The same plugin architecture, extensible by the same AI
Check GPT-6 thread for example, now that's Astra-turfed lol.
I'm not sure what you mean by it's a beast.
(blackbear.app was developed entirely by a custom harness architecture)
also this is a very limited static snapshot with one model as backend, I wish there were more consistently refreshed and diversified harness benchmarks.
It happens more often than you think, especially when VRAM is limited!
Not providing DSH as a simple to install package resulted in an unknown third party packaging it with some modifications and SEO the hell out of it to always come on top in Internet searches (even above DS):
deepseekharness[.]io
Could be just an ambitious engineer, but could equally easily be ran by cyber criminals or NSA.
I'm not yet sure if it is really sensible long-term, but it is definitely now while we're still trying to figure out what exactly we want and need from LLMs and harnesses.
Good things about it are that it is extremely lightweight and fast. The communication between sub agents is two way in that a sub agent can midway send a message to parent and the parent can send a message midway to change the course of action of a sub agent and while this is happening, you can sitll continue talking to the model on the main thread.
Downside of DeepSeek is that it is constantly in flux which is understandable and they make it very clear themselves that the breaking changes are to be expected.
Captcha had me ruffled at the onset as I am slightly visually impaired and couldn't pick out the somewhat grainy images. It seems to be the standard now.
Meanwhile there is an american backdoor in your bios, cpu and router
In general, a harness is something that lets your AI use tools on your computer and lets it work independently while you walk away. (Very simplified definition, not all harnesses are that automated.)
It's a long time since I tried Vibe, but when I did it was one of the worst. Back then it had broken support for MCP or computer use and other tools people now regard as near essential in AI. Hopefully Vibe is better now. Sadly Mistral are a long way behind.
With the preview of official app, hope team will add remote connection soon.
It currently does not work with Bun and it is somewhat complicated to run it in a remote docker container due to the its weird security model.
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/blob/master/...
https://github.com/deepseek-ai/deepseek-harness/blob/master/...
My wild theory is that we already have AGI level models, but we are not yet using them correctly.
what we don’t have yet are the tools to take full advantage of the agi we do have. they’re coming soon.
/s
Kind of like how we all fail to see the bearded guy in the sky.
A marketplace, where the different intelligence agencies could evaluate the value of my digital stuff and then offer me something (like a $5 gift card to Olive Garden), would be really nice.
Children with no life have never had anything worth keeping private. Even the question of having nothing to hide is foreign if you've never done anything at all.
It's like that parable about God giving us free will. If or when the intelligence agencies manage to create a generation with nothing to hide, what will their purpose be? You might as well take field notes on birds or sheep.
Reminds me of some magic device from childrens book, don't remember its name, was like a glass ball where you could see what other people are up to
oh, good old times of PRISM, rightly bygone. Of course they don't do this now.
I rate the US last because the US government shares information with European governments, so it's the most likely to affect me. I wrote this next to my dishwasher though, and if it's anything like those LG tv's it probably identified what I wrote from the keystroke sounds or something.
Why the fuck would I care? The spooks definitely won't. I'm one person on a planet of 8 billion.
I think people don't appreciate the scale of that. A person is like a pixel on a 4k screen, in a wall that's made of many screens (about 5 in case of my country, about 42 in case of the US). Nobody cares what the single pixel does. It's not even visible unless it's so broken it doesn't change the same way surrounding pixels do.
I have a feeling that all this privacy obsession is actually a reaction to the unconscious feeling of irrelevance at this scale. In their minds, people defy the fact they're just sand for the systems of modern civilization - no, they are the very special ones, each fancies themselves a player among billions of NPCs, and to prove their uniqueness and specialness, they want to hide that fact from other NPCs, and get annoyed at the notion the world may indeed discover they are special.
Nothing else makes sense. Not in the west at least, where the only realistic threat from loss of privacy is getting weirder ads (hint: a real power move is to start with ad blocking and removing ads - and ad-infested media sources - from your life).
Now, loss of control over your daily life and your computing devices, that's another story. But most people don't seem to care about those.
So will western countries.
At least chinese offers 95% of the quality at 10% of the price.
You guys at Langley get Columbus Day off or did they go woke up there
This new title says nothing, we already know deepseek harness from before, this is a new product, an installable app worth differentiating from just "DeepSeek Harness"
I'd probably check it out if it was actually called 'YAH Harness' and not [insert Chinese AI lab here] Harness
What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.
Now don't down vote before understanding the definition of a fasict:
"A fascist is a person who advocates for or adheres to fascism, a far-right, authoritarian, and ultranationalist political ideology."
China is none of that.