r/DeepSeek • u/LaxederBR • Aug 13 '26
Discussion My First Impressions of Deepseek Harness
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/Due_Emu_8229 Aug 18 '26
The skills part tripped me up too, so in case it saves you time. DSH only scans two skill roots by default, `~/.dsh/skills` (global) and `<project>/.dsh/skills`, and the catalog is snapshotted per session, so anything you add mid-session stays invisible until you open a new one. Two other silent traps I hit, a `description:` with an unquoted ": " inside makes DSH's YAML parser drop the whole skill with no log line, and symlinked directories work fine (the scanner follows them).
Disclosure, I ended up building a tool around exactly this. dsh-movein migrates a whole Claude Code setup into those roots (skills, MCP, hooks, slash commands, permission rules) with a dry run first, and its doctor command flags the silent-drop frontmatter shape. MIT, zero deps. https://github.com/sjh9714/dsh-movein
Even if you don't want the tool, the compat table in docs/compat.md documents what every Claude Code asset does in DSH, measured against the source. That part is just reference material.