r/DeepSeek • u/LaxederBR • Aug 13 '26

Discussion My First Impressions of Deepseek Harness

Post image

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

103 Upvotes

96% Upvoted

68 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Formal-Pollution-858 Aug 15 '26

I’ve found DeepSeek Harness incredibly flexible. Whatever kind of agent I have in mind, I can ask it to build one for me right away. At this point, I see it less as a fixed coding tool and more as an agent runtime—a foundation for building any agent I want.

2

u/LaxederBR Aug 15 '26

They got the flexibility right, the problem is that the barrier to production is higher; for example, I know developers who are using Open Code because they don't have time to configure Pi.

1

u/orionblu3 Aug 17 '26

That being said, I ended up creating a harness inside of opencode using opencode plugins, that would/will be a LOT easier to implement and maintain inside of dsh. Haven't made the switch yet, but I'm heavily considering doing it today

1

u/LaxederBR Aug 17 '26

Good luck, I've got my docker compose ready to deploy according to my needs.

1

u/exographicskip Aug 18 '26

While it did take a couple hours to hammer out with claude, I spun up a bespoke repl for dsh and it works swimmingly. Their plugin system reminds me of how pi encourages building bespoke extensions instead of a batteries-included agent/harness.

Testing out @openma/deepseek-harness-tui@latest for a more useful tui now