A tutorial titled this an official launch. I checked the update feed first. Windows x64, Mac Apple silicon, and Mac Intel all said 0.2.0-rc.2, with releaseDate 2026-09-29T10:35:27Z. The filenames are still nightly. An rc on a nightly feed is not the same sentence as “stable release.”
The product page is up: DeepSeek Harness. It says the project is in open testing, open source, built on Cordis, and that everything is a plugin. It can be a desktop app or a web app started from code.
The installers exist. The platform list does not.
The feeds that actually point at files are Windows x64, plus Mac arm64 and Mac x64. The Windows exe is listed at 289,313,640 bytes, about 276 MB. The Apple silicon auto-update zip is about 357 MB. The Linux x64 and Windows ARM feed URLs I tried returned a site page, not a package. Intel Mac was missing from earlier reports. It is on the September 29 feed. Versions move. Don’t bookmark a direct file. Read the feed:
- Windows: https://download.deepseek.com/dsh-desk/feeds/win-x64/nightly.yml
- Mac Apple silicon: https://download.deepseek.com/dsh-desk/feeds/mac-arm64/nightly-mac.yml
- Mac Intel: https://download.deepseek.com/dsh-desk/feeds/mac-x64/nightly-mac.yml
Earlier writeups said the desktop packages spread before any announcement, then at 0.1.7-rc.2. You sign in with a DeepSeek account or an API key and pick a local folder as the workspace. The UI has been described with standard, PTC, minimal, and create modes. Create mode is the one that lets it write plugins. See the NetEase reprint and the Jiqizhixin notes.
Default model, six yuan, and “200 plugins”
The product-page demo sits on DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with reasoning set to High. V4.1 Flash shipped on September 10. On the API, the model name deepseek-flash is that model. WorkBuddy and OpenCode are named as official partners. The release note says both are connected.
Three lines in the tutorial are not on the news page I read.
Download and get 6 yuan, gone after the National Day holiday. If that credit exists, it should show up in the client balance. Don’t take a tutorial as the expiry clock.
Default model V4.1 Flash. That matches his profile and the product-page demo. It is what he saw on open, not a published promise about every install.
Two hundred built-in plugins. That number fights the other report. Jiqizhixin counted about six official plugins on screen, with agent team and voice input still marked experimental. The product page talks about installing plugins and building your own, not a ready menu of 200. If a screenshot says 200, treat it as a catalog size, not as items you can click today.
The sidebar can show token rate, cache, and how much context is used. The right side is the trace. That matches the developer tools on the product page: rounds, tool calls, and timings expand. He asked it to create a skill that replies only “hello 123” no matter what the user says. It sat still for about five minutes. He killed the task, told it to continue, and the second pass finished quickly. I did not reproduce the stall. The trace panel is how you see which step stuck.
The product page sorts the work into five jobs, which is easier to check than “200 plugins.” Organize notes, sheets, docs, and decks. Change a repo and run tests. Search and cite sources. Run scripts and batch files in the background. Install a plugin, or build one in create mode by talking to it. The on-page example is a pomodoro float window. The demo took 5 minutes 24 seconds.
I trust those five because they are on the product page. His skill stall and that plugin demo both landed around five minutes. That does not mean every task takes five minutes. It means this kind of job does not come back instantly.
He then asked the app to inventory the tools from that run. Its own trace said about 11 PowerShell calls, 3 reads, 2 writes, 1 skill load, and 1 killed job that had timed out. One grep failed because the regex was not closed. Those counts are the model reporting on itself, not a stopwatch I held. Fine for seeing what a trace contains. Not a benchmark.
Skills live in this folder. Plugins are something else.
User-level skills go in ~/.dsh/skills. On his Windows machine that was C:UsersAdministrator.dshskills. The manager he points at is skills-manager, which says it supports DeepSeek too.
He asked the desktop app to explain Cordis. The README it read describes Cordis as a TypeScript plugin framework: dependency injection, scopes, and lifecycle. The product page is shorter. Harness sits on Cordis. Chat, settings, models, and tools are plugins.
Don’t mix a skill with a Cordis plugin.
| Skill | Cordis plugin | |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A SKILL.md with frontmatter |
A package with code and a manifest |
| How it turns on | Discovered in a folder, injected into context when needed | Loaded and run in the process |
| What it can change | How the agent approaches a task | UI, tools, behavior |
| What he changed | Wrote hello-123 | He said he did not touch plugin config |
His desktop profile patch only had account, chat, settings, and theme rows. Session logging was off. That is a snapshot of his machine. Don’t assume your plugin list matches. Config replaces the whole row. It does not deep-merge. That is why the advice is to install through the plugin manager instead of hand-editing cordis.yml.
The close button failed. “Lean” depends who you compare
He clicked the red close control and the desktop app stayed open. One bug, one machine, one build. Enough to remember this is still an rc, and a bad idea as your only workbench. Not enough to claim the next build fixes it. I did not retry it on 0.2.0-rc.2.
The post ends by calling the desktop app “very lean” next to WorkBuddy. WorkBuddy is an official V4.1 Flash partner, not the same product. Lean makes sense if you mean it doesn’t wrap a full office suite. Lean does not mean faster or more stable. He gave no numbers, and I won’t invent them.
FAQ
Should I install a final release?
The feed is still nightly, and the version still says rc. Try it if you want. Don’t treat it as frozen.
Is there a Linux build?
The linux-x64 feed I checked had no package. Use the web app until a feed lists a file.
Is the 6 yuan credit official?
It shows up in this tutorial. I did not find the same line on the news page.
Will writing a skill change plugins?
Not on the trace he published. A markdown file and a plugin that runs code are different jobs.
After install, do three small things. Don’t point the workspace at the whole disk. Open the trace and confirm tool calls are moving. Ask it to read ~/.dsh/skills only, and tell it not to edit config. Then give it one small job, such as adding a year-over-year column to a sheet already in the workspace, and watch how fast the context percentage climbs. If it jumps, unrelated files got pulled in. Shrink the workspace to the current project.
Open the nightly feed before you install, and see if the version still says rc. Are you on the web app, or is the desktop build already on your machine?