DeepSeek Harness Desktop for macOS and Windows

(deepseek.com)

207 points | by Kuyawa 5 hours ago

23 comments

  • ssivark 3 hours ago
    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.

    [1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.25512

  • scuppernong 4 hours ago
    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.

    • zihotki 19 minutes ago
      I wonder why there is no Github Copilot in the comparison. It also supports BYOK and is quite capable
    • polotics 1 hour ago
      how could the authors of frontierharness.org not see they used the exact same symbol for Claude Code and OhMyPi?
      • hypfer 1 hour ago
        The authors might lack vision capabilities?

        It happens more often than you think, especially when VRAM is limited!

    • cdelsolar 1 hour ago
      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
      • 233mhz 33 minutes ago
        It sounds fancy and technical. Like when people use "orders of magnitude" six times per thread on this forum but no ever ever use it irl
      • vrganj 36 minutes ago
        People realized AI is expensive and wanted a cool techy way to say "good bang for your buck"
  • throwa356262 1 hour ago
    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.

  • Kuyawa 5 hours ago
    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

    • sroerick 2 hours ago
      Deepseek harness seems good but this thread feels astroturfy
      • fakwandi_priv 1 hour ago
        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..
      • dudisubekti 1 hour ago
        Lol what? Have you seen actual shilled threads?

        Check GPT-6 thread for example, now that's Astra-turfed lol.

    • proc0 48 minutes ago
      Is this for the DS API or with the local version?
    • ycui7 4 hours ago
      you do can change font size in settings, but not with keyboard shortcut. for some reason, they decided to limit font size to 17 max.
      • Kuyawa 4 hours ago
        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
    • johng 4 hours ago
      Can you elaborate? What's better about it vs. other harnesses? What can it do that others can't?

      I'm not sure what you mean by it's a beast.

      • cjbprime 3 hours ago
        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.
      • Kuyawa 4 hours ago
        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
        • anonzzzies 2 hours ago
          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.
        • pylotlight 3 hours ago
          literally every harness can do that tho, that doesn't really answer the question.
          • zarmin 3 hours ago
            i read somewhere that it can write a plugin to change its font size
            • konart 2 hours ago
              Pi can do this too.
      • logicchains 1 hour ago
        It uses an append-only design for the context which rules out all kinds of cache-invalidation bugs that pop up regularly in other harnesses.
    • gigatexal 2 hours ago
      What an ad! Do they pay you??
      • hypfer 1 hour ago
        If you check the user bio then the answer might be "no, but equivalent to yes".
        • chvid 8 minutes ago
          We all love DeepSeek. They are what is standing between freedom and total submission to the AI oligarchs.
    • rheisen_ 1 hour ago
      Just wait until I add coding to https://blackbear.app... it's going to be ridiculous.

      (blackbear.app was developed entirely by a custom harness architecture)

  • hypfer 1 hour ago
    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.

  • Xunxi 33 minutes ago
    Interesting! Pretty clean UI.

    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.

  • wg0 1 hour ago
    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.

  • noduerme 48 minutes ago
    Sweet, I really wanna put backdoors in every account I have access to.
    • 233mhz 35 minutes ago
      "china bad because china copy"

      Meanwhile there is an american backdoor in your bios, cpu and router

  • proc0 48 minutes ago
    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.
    • JamesMcMinn 25 minutes ago
      It works fine with local models. I have it pointing at my strix halo running Qwen3.8 Flash Next, for example.
    • barcoder 42 minutes ago
      It's normally best to use the harness for the specific model. However, I found Cline is good with various models
  • maelito 37 minutes ago
    I'm sorry, what is a harness, compared to a complete Web LLm "chat" like Mistral Vibe ?
    • SyneRyder 12 minutes ago
      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.

    • 233mhz 35 minutes ago
      The whole thing around the model that handles system prompt, skills, agents, cache, etc. For example codex, claude code, pi, oh-my-pi, ...
  • quyleanh 4 hours ago
    DSH still in preview but works flawlessly. Update also very quick.

    With the preview of official app, hope team will add remote connection soon.

  • contravariant 1 hour ago
    Maybe this is too late to ask, but what even is a harness?
    • metchio 1 hour ago
      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
      • vrganj 44 minutes ago
        In the olden days, this used to be called Command and Control malware and was indicative of a major security breach.
    • adyavanapalli 42 minutes ago
      [dead]
  • blain 1 hour ago
    How can website be this slow, i can barelly scroll down on mobile.
  • kindablissy 1 hour ago
    China number 1 as always.
  • StrauXX 2 hours ago
    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.
    • throwa356262 1 hour ago
      On the contrary, I belive this will be the next battlefield.

      My wild theory is that we already have AGI level models, but we are not yet using them correctly.

      • Octoth0rpe 1 hour ago
        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.
      • StrauXX 1 hour ago
        If we had AGI, they could per definition build a harness better than any human could. In such a regime, (human) pre-built harnesses are moot.
        • 010ED67913 1 hour ago
          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.

        • throwa356262 1 hour ago
          We maybe need an AGI level harness and an AGI level model to get there and we currently only have one of those?
        • ozozozd 59 minutes ago
          They said AGI is here. What you are describing is RSI.

          /s

      • grim_io 1 hour ago
        Uhuh, sure. We are holding the AGI wrong.
        • ozozozd 1 hour ago
          Always. Folks even believe all of us including themselves are holding it wrong.

          Kind of like how we all fail to see the bearded guy in the sky.

          • puelocesar 4 minutes ago
            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
  • cpursley 57 minutes ago
    No rustie, no installie. Got enough bloat electron and node bloat, already.
  • jdw64 1 hour ago
    very nice harness! good code
  • ElProlactin 3 hours ago
    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.

    • noduerme 39 minutes ago
      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.

    • postsantum 3 hours ago
      Yes! A real marketplace of ideas with automatic matching, like you can see who has the same ideas as you

      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

      • TeMPOraL 55 minutes ago
        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.
      • throwawayqqq11 1 hour ago
        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?
        • itgoon 54 minutes ago
          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.
    • kkarpkkarp 1 hour ago
      > I wish there was a tool I could use to share my documents, activity, etc. directly with the world's major intelligence agencies.

      oh, good old times of PRISM, rightly bygone. Of course they don't do this now.

    • Bluestein 3 hours ago
      Facebook? (But they get the money ...)
    • kvirani 3 hours ago
      I don't get it
      • rapind 3 hours ago
        I think they’re saying they would rather use Muse or Dots.
      • TeMPOraL 53 minutes ago
        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.
      • npn 3 hours ago
        He thinks his ideas are still valuable and wants to sell them somehow.
        • Sabinus 1 hour ago
          How comfortable are you sending a copy of every AI session transcript you generate to: 1) Me 2) The Chinese government 3) The US government
          • Quothling 52 minutes ago
            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.

          • thenthenthen 40 minutes ago
            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)
          • TeMPOraL 32 minutes ago
            Totally.

            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.

    • noduerme 47 minutes ago
      Your documents are worth endless breadsticks as long as you keep making new ones, puny human
    • tobi_bsf 3 hours ago
      The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)
      • cheonic4040 2 hours ago
        > The chinese will go and suck in all of your laptop and everything else from your network when you install this ;)

        So will western countries.

        At least chinese offers 95% of the quality at 10% of the price.

      • Shin-- 2 hours ago
        I installed it on my laptop and it immediately vanished. I am sure Xi is browsing the hard drive right now.
      • smitty1110 2 hours ago
        Just put your trust in Big Winnie and all will be fine.
      • kindablissy 1 hour ago
        That's how AI works, sir.
      • Drupon 1 hour ago
        >The chinese

        You guys at Langley get Columbus Day off or did they go woke up there

  • Kuyawa 3 hours ago
    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"

    • nezhar 2 hours ago
      Thanks, was wondering why this is in the feed.
  • webXL 4 hours ago
    Sigh. Yet another harness...

    I'd probably check it out if it was actually called 'YAH Harness' and not [insert Chinese AI lab here] Harness

    • Zambyte 3 hours ago
      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.
    • djriley 1 hour ago
      You can use it to write a plug-in to change the name to YAH Harness!
  • jamienk 4 hours ago
    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.
    • neya 4 hours ago
      > I'm DeepSeek Harness, an open-source harness from DeepSeek built on Cordis's “everything is a plugin” architecture.
  • accountrequired 2 hours ago
    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!
    • Sha1rholder 1 hour ago
      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.
    • yjh0502 1 hour ago
      As a non-American, I see handing my data to an American company as potentially just as risky as handing it to a Chinese company.
    • latentsea 1 hour ago
      Well under the current US administration as non-US citizens we kinda feel this sentiment about the US now fwiw.
    • nextaccountic 2 hours ago
      It's open source. Unlike Claude Code
    • jluysvi 2 hours ago
      Ahh! Not China! Real Americans™ let their data go to American™ companies!
    • qurren 2 hours ago
      > Your data goes to china.

      What are they going to do? They have no jurisdiction over me.

      • harvey9 1 hour ago
        No jurisdiction but their operatives have global reach. For most people the more practical risk for any rented ai is IP theft.
      • wickedsight 1 hour ago
        Exactly. Meanwhile, nearly all my personal data is stored on servers owned by US companies. Feels much more risky.
    • sampullman 2 hours ago
      What if I use it in an isolated environment and only work on open source code with it?
    • wg0 1 hour ago
      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."

      China is none of that.

    • bedane 1 hour ago
      better this than three-letter agencies from some nazi warmongering alternative
    • glenpierce 2 hours ago
      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…