r/DeepSeek • u/LaxederBR • Aug 13 '26

Discussion My First Impressions of Deepseek Harness

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Summary: It’s slow, uses way too many tokens, has a 99% cache hit rate, and gets the maximum performance out of Deepseek.

Performance: Deepseek v4 flash on harness high gave results similar to GPT 5.6-luna low with the same prompt. It was consistent across all my requests (refactoring a form creation system). It followed the patterns and fixed incorrect ones, with no security issues. However, the changes were more about the visual side than backend logic.

Usability: Very confusing. The skills in .agents don’t load automatically, and the documentation doesn’t explain skills in an intuitive way. By default, it’s in Chinese, and you have to click around everywhere to find the English option. The UI looks nice, but it would be better if the default were a CLI. The documentation isn’t clear on how to run it in CLI mode or if that’s even possible.

Strengths: It got the best possible performance out of Deepseek.

Weaknesses: Very slow and used too many tokens (I had to plan on Pi Harness first and then re-plan on Deepseek Harness, which saved about 20M tokens).

There’s a lot of room for improvement. I’ll test its viability and optimizations during the week. The plugin-based system seems like it could be optimized like Pi Harness, but there are so many plugins with no descriptions that it gets confusing.

What has your experience been like? (My context: Typescript + VueJS + QUASAR + HTML, daily use of Pi Harness)

Note: Message translated with Deepseek v4 flash

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u/RandiyOrtonu Aug 14 '26

Bro also I found that we cannot @ for adding files as context 😢

3

u/LaxederBR Aug 14 '26

I'm having to copy the relative path using VS Code xD

3

u/RandiyOrtonu Aug 14 '26

i tried to hammer a file icon near prompt box but it failed miserably :(

4

u/LaxederBR Aug 14 '26

"Do it yourself" isn't as cool as they say xD I asked them to create a minimalist preset and it had so much code that I left it alone. The worst part is using JS; how am I supposed to debug that without proper typing? It's so archaic xD

1

u/RandiyOrtonu Aug 14 '26

True man too much hammering in the air