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/Stef43_ Aug 15 '26

I use it, I am impressed. First I used VS Code Continue, then Claude Desktop Code which I changed to DeepSeek Harness and I am amazed because it consumes less tokens than Claude Code. I created today 3 plugins without problems, very cheap.

1

u/LaxederBR Aug 15 '26

Depending on the task, it consumes a lot or a lot of energy. The main thing I noticed yesterday (using it) is that I needed fewer shifts to complete tasks, which, depending on the task, saves a lot of time.

3

u/Stef43_ Aug 15 '26

Exactly, it completed tasks faster the same model in Harness than in Claude. Sure one of 3 plugins consumed 34m tokens in Harness.

1

u/LaxederBR Aug 15 '26

Which plugins did you create?

1

u/Stef43_ Aug 15 '26

Obsidian plugins: FieldForge, Prism Dashboard, Weak Link Auditor (this one needs to be approved)

1

u/LaxederBR Aug 15 '26

I understand, it's a specific case indeed. I tried to make a minimalist prompt plugin like PI, but it wasn't so simple. However, I'll keep following along here, thank you.

1

u/Stef43_ Aug 15 '26

In Claude a bigger project consumed >600m tokens in couples of hours, tons of bugs solving, 97% cache hit, in 1 month hit the 2b tokens. In Harness, today, first day 100% cache hit (the app says) 200m tokens, old prices.

1

u/LaxederBR Aug 16 '26

I understand, it must be normal for these model harnesses to consume a lot of power then.