Why DeepSeek Harness Just Became The Fastest Growing Github Repo EVER
CChase AI
Computing/SoftwareInternet Technology
Transcript
00:00:00so deep seek just open source their own harness it's called deep seek harness think of clod code
00:00:05for clod this is deep seek harness for deep seek and it has become the fastest growing repo ever
00:00:10we're at 167 000 stars in under a week now the thing you keep hearing with this harness
00:00:16is that everything is a plugin and this can get kind of confusing because we already have plugins
00:00:21in other harnesses like clod code and codex oftentimes those look like skills or mcps or clis
00:00:26these different outside tools we can tack on to the harness itself how is deep seek harness any
00:00:32different well the deep seek harness allows us to actually edit and change the harness itself in ways
00:00:38you just can't do with these other harnesses and big picture what deep seek is really trying to sell
00:00:43you is the infinitely customizable harness that can be somewhat self-improving in certain respects it can
00:00:49write its own plugins for its own harness that could be custom to whatever it is you're trying to do and
00:00:55so the response to this has been an exploding ecosystem of deep seek harness plugins that you
00:01:00can attach to whatever your build looks like on top of that this is something we can make completely
00:01:04local we can use this with any sort of model we want so there's a lot to work with here but the big
00:01:09question becomes does this live up to the hype is this new harness actually worth 167 000 stars in a
00:01:16handful of days especially for someone who's already using clod code or codex well that's exactly what we're
00:01:21going to talk about today and i'm also going to break down how this thing actually works so you can make
00:01:25an informed decision about whether you should move to this harness now first let's talk about installing
00:01:30this thing if you just search for the deep seek harness on github you will find this page to install
00:01:35it you'll just run this command in the terminal and it's going to bring up a web ui that looks just like
00:01:40this now this setup should be pretty familiar as it follows pretty much all the conventions of all the
00:01:44other harnesses over there on the left hand side we have our workspaces which is just the folders
00:01:49underneath here you'll have your different chat windows right up front we have our prompt window
00:01:53again you can choose your workspace and then we have a series of modes we can choose from so we have
00:01:59standard mode ptc mode minimal mode and creator mode so standard mode exactly what it sounds like it's
00:02:05standard this is like what you do for inside a cloud code ptc mode is all about multi-step tasks so in
00:02:10standard mode if you wanted it to do a bunch of tool calls it would do those tool calls one by one
00:02:15in ptc mode instead it would create a script where it runs all the tools essentially in one
00:02:21go the idea is if you're doing like complex tasks this will reduce some of the context blow that you
00:02:26get when you're just calling the tools one by one we then have minimal mode that's for very simple tasks
00:02:31and then lastly we have creator mode and we'll touch on that later but creator mode is where you can
00:02:35create your own plugins for this harness we press this plus button we have a number of different slash
00:02:41commands again some of these should be familiar to you things like compact things like goal
00:02:46i then have permissions for read only workspace right in full access and then lastly we have our
00:02:51model in our effort now remember this is an open source tool you don't have to use deep seek for this
00:02:56in my case i'm not using the deep seek api i'm using open router so i have access to you know
00:03:01essentially every single model out there now in order to set that up i'm going to come down and go to
00:03:05settings i'm going to go to models and then you just add a provider and insert your api key over
00:03:12here in general just sort of your standard stuff one thing i'll mention is the enter behavior while
00:03:17busy this is similar to what we see in codex so if it is executing some sort of tool call you can have
00:03:21it by default bq or steer so if it's on queue it's going to wait till it's done doing what it's doing
00:03:26before it takes your next message versus steer that's where it's going to finish its current tool
00:03:30call and then bring in your additional message next we have plugins so over here on the plugin list
00:03:35this is essentially every single thing you can do inside of the deep seek harness specified as a
00:03:40plugin and then we have the plugin configuration which shows us things we can actually edit inside
00:03:46of the harness itself like when we look at something like the agent loop this is literally
00:03:50like a core part of the plumbing of the deep seek harness that you can begin to edit just in
00:03:55terms of parallel tool calls and you can go deeper with these sort of edits using creator mode
00:03:59this is the difference between deep seek harness and cloud code cloud code you can sort of approximate
00:04:04a lot of these changes that we make at the harness level inside of the deep seek harness
00:04:08with things like skills and hooks but you aren't changing the actual plumbing under the hood you can
00:04:13do that here but on the flip side with all this customizability comes some annoyances for example
00:04:18like the web search if you want to be able to use web search out of the box you need to provide
00:04:22the deep seek api key well if you don't have that and you're using some sort of other model well you
00:04:27now need to find a plugin that allows you to do web search with with essentially any model for example
00:04:33i installed this free search plugin which allows me to use things like bing or duck duck go for my
00:04:38web search so i found this plugin on github again there is a huge exploding library of different deep
00:04:44seek harness plugins and simply follow the instructions to install it now does that seem somewhat sketchy that
00:04:49i'm installing some random chinese plugin well first of all i actually had cloud code take a look at it to
00:04:54make sure it wasn't sketchy but two this whole idea of sketchy plugins is something you want to pay
00:04:58attention to and is a major sort of red flag with the whole deep seek harness concept because as of
00:05:04right now out of the box remember this is in developer preview every single plugin you add to deep seek
00:05:09harness gets full shell access and full access to your entire file system so like if you install a
00:05:15random plugin into deep seek harness again this is very reminiscent to like when opencloth first came onto the
00:05:20scene be wary make sure you know what you're doing because if there is a bad actor that has some sort
00:05:26of sketchy plugin that can take a look at your api keys because it will essentially have permission to
00:05:30do so you can be in a bad spot so just be careful there hopefully this is something that changes and
00:05:35again that is one of the differences between deep seek and cloud code now let's say i want to install
00:05:40a plugin a great resource right now is the awesome deep seek harness plugin page on github which has a huge
00:05:46curated list of a bunch of different ones let's say i'm looking for ui enhancements because again since
00:05:50we can edit the harness itself we can do things like change what the actual user interface looks
00:05:55like let's say i want to add an effort slider well then brings me to that github page and then i just
00:06:00follow the instructions for the install which in this case is just running this command inside of the
00:06:05terminal so i run the command i then restart the deep seek harness and i now have this effort level slider
00:06:12now one thing you're gonna see on a lot of people's sort of like pages and content related is deep seek
00:06:16harness and plugins is the idea that when i there's like a built-in hot reload system for the plugins
00:06:21where you don't have to restart the harness that is kind of sort of true it depends on the plugin itself
00:06:25for certain plugins like the one you saw here yes you do need to restart the harness and it takes like
00:06:30two seconds but that's as easy as installing plugins is now if i want to create my own plugin which i think
00:06:36is the big sell for this thing is i'm just going to go into creator mode and i'm just going to
00:06:40describe the type of plugin i want to create so let's keep it kind of simple here with the ui and say
00:06:46i want you to create a plugin that changes the ui color scheme to look like the matrix with the
00:06:58falling ascii characters in the background can't type
00:07:09so another thing i want to point out here as it begins creating its own plugin so right here at the
00:07:15bottom we get a little more information than you might necessarily get with other harnesses i can
00:07:18see things like the cache hit percentage i can see the input and output tokens i can see my tokens per
00:07:23second all this cool stuff also in terms of what i actually see on the screen here i think it goes a
00:07:29little bit more in depth than where we see uh what other models show us right context injection i can see
00:07:34the actual system prompt itself and what's really cool is this thing up here called the trajectory
00:07:39where i get like deep insight into everything that is happening like the user the context the assistant
00:07:45the tools if i click on these things i can get even more information right a summary a preview raw
00:07:52source and this is like way more insight and way more visibility than a harness like cloud code is going to
00:07:58give you so in the situations where you're having to do a lot of troubleshooting like where is stuff
00:08:02actually going wrong well this is where i can find it and if you see this thing called cordis all over
00:08:07the place well this harness at its core the kernel the engine of this thing is this program called
00:08:14cordis this is what it all runs on and so cordis is like just this chassis of the car and the plugins
00:08:20is the engine and all these other things we're putting on it now you also have the ability to download
00:08:24the entire session log which goes into a zip folder and that is going to show you all this inside
00:08:28of json and i can also break it down by turns and calls and all this stuff so that's the other big
00:08:33sell for this harness that i think it does better than anything else is the insights to what's actually
00:08:37going on under the hood and the second thing is this this idea of custom plugins that affect the
00:08:43harness because again take this to like it's extreme once this thing is actually pretty flushed out
00:08:49well imagine changing how the harness works at its most base level so that it is perfect for your
00:08:55particular problems again we try to approximate that in things like cloud code and codex with
00:09:00skills and hooks and really you see that with dynamic workflows but this lets you get extremely granular
00:09:06so here's a look at what it created obviously this is ugly as sin but the silly example shows you how
00:09:11easy it is to create custom plugins that affect the harness itself now one thing to note when you create
00:09:16custom plugins it doesn't save it it's not permanent you have to tell it that you want it to be saved so
00:09:22that is just a prompt to say hey i want to save this plugin or i want to save this plugin with a toggle
00:09:26something to that effect or else you're going to lose it at the end of this session so that's the
00:09:31deep seek harness in a nutshell again the two big cells here are the custom plugins the fact that we can
00:09:36edit the harness at an extremely base foundational level and i would say this trajectory right the ability
00:09:42to actually get really deep with what the ai system is actually doing under the hood when we're
00:09:48giving it prompts and things of that nature we just don't have that same level of control with any
00:09:53other harness plus the fact that it's open source and it can be fully local all that is great as well
00:09:57so with all that being said should you leave cloud code should you leave codex and jump ship to the
00:10:02deep seek harness probably not don't get me wrong i think the deep seek harness is awesome i'm glad they
00:10:08didn't try to just create a cloud code clone or create another harness that looks like everything else out
00:10:12there this everything is a plugin approach and the fact that it's extremely customizable is awesome and
00:10:19the dream of this you know self-improving harness that can create its own plugins and adjust itself to
00:10:25your task sounds awesome in theory but in reality i don't know if it's ever going to actually happen
00:10:31and maybe it will but not today and there's also the question of like is it worth it to do something
00:10:37like that is it really moving the needle so much to have this custom harness for your problem
00:10:41and is it also worth the time and energy to get to that place maybe maybe not maybe eventually will
00:10:48either way today i think it's tough to say it's really a step above cloud code in any sense
00:10:53but it's free it's open source it's fully local so why not use it why not tinker with it
00:10:58and give it a shot because we can use both of these things we aren't stuck with any one tool
00:11:02and in general we should definitely be tool agnostic so definitely try it out let me know what you think
00:11:08as always make sure to check out chase ai plus if you want to get your hands on my cloud code masterclass
00:11:13and besides that i'll see you around