🎯 Why automation

DSH Core Schedule is the right tool for reminders in the current conversation: “come back to this Session in ten minutes.” dsh-automation handles a different job: “run this complete task independently every weekday and leave me a result I can inspect.”

If a task depends on unstated chat history, needs an interactive approval halfway through, or should react to a file, HTTP, or process condition rather than time, it is not a good automation yet.

✨ Features

🕹️ One control plane, two ways in

• DSH Web: open Automations from the sidebar or the conversation tab to create a rule, pause or resume it, run it now, delete it, and inspect recent runs. On the blank New Session screen, the sidebar shortcut tells you to start a conversation instead of failing silently.
• Any eligible root Agent: ask in natural language. Six scoped tools let the Agent manage automations only for its exact workspace.

There is no separate bot, daemon UI, or third-party scheduler to operate.

📅 Schedules people can read

Create a one-shot, fixed-interval, daily, or weekly rule. Daily and weekly schedules use an IANA time zone; the friendly form is normalized into a validated RFC 5545 RRULE for persistence and inspection.

🧠 A model target for each automation

The Web form can follow the live global model or pin one provider/model pair. A pinned model can use its own default reasoning effort or one of the opaque effort values advertised by that exact model. The card shows the saved target, and each run keeps the same target in its immutable snapshot.

Agent tools expose the same fields. Omitting all model fields on create preserves the existing behavior of capturing the creating Session's complete selection; explicitly setting provider and model to null follows the live global selection at run time. On update, omitted fields stay unchanged, null clears a pin, and changing the route without an effort resets to the new model's default.

🧼 A clean execution boundary every time

Each dispatched occurrence receives:

• a new Session ID and fresh root Agent;
• the saved prompt, not the source conversation history;
• the captured workspace, cwd, Agent preset, permission preset, and a durable model target that either follows the live global selection or pins one model and optional reasoning effort;
• an explicit automation message source containing the automation ID, run ID, and scheduled time;
• a terminal result derived from the actual DSH turn end, not merely “message delivered.”

🧾 History that explains failure as well as success

Runs progress through queued, running, and a terminal state such as succeeded, failed, skipped, or cancelled. Each record keeps its definition revision, prompt and target snapshot, scheduled time, result Session ID, bounded summary, and structured error.

Updating a definition increments its revision, so each retained run still identifies what it executed. Deleting the definition does not immediately erase those run records. Retention removes only the oldest terminal records; queued and running records are never pruned.

Set archiveRunSessions: true in the Cordis plugin config to archive completed, failed, cancelled, and other terminal run Sessions from the ordinary DSH conversation list. Their logs are not deleted: the Automations run history keeps the Session ID, summary, and error as an auditable inbox. Current Harness releases do not expose an unarchive API, so an archived result is labeled instead of offering a broken Session-open action. The default is false and preserves ordinary Session navigation.

⚡ Install

Install the GitHub bundle into the DSH Web profile, then restart dsh web:

dsh plugin --profile web add github:titanwings/dsh-automation#v0.1.7

The version tag keeps the install reproducible; a reviewed commit SHA is equally valid. If you run DSH from its source checkout, use pnpm dsh in place of dsh.

git clone https://github.com/titanwings/dsh-automation.git
cd dsh-automation
pnpm install
pnpm check

cd /path/to/deepseek-harness
pnpm dsh plugin --profile web add /absolute/path/to/dsh-automation

🚀 Quick start

🖥️ From DSH Web

1. Open a Session attached to the workspace you want to automate.
2. Open Automations from the sidebar, or select it next to Chat and Trajectory. If the New Session screen is still blank, start the conversation first.
3. Enter a self-contained task, schedule, IANA time zone, model target, and permission boundary.
4. Use Run now once before relying on the schedule; inspect the resulting Session and run record.

💬 Ask an Agent

Once installed, eligible root Agents receive the management tools. For example:

Create a read-only automation called "Weekday regression triage" for this workspace.
Run it Monday through Friday at 09:30 in Asia/Shanghai. Inspect the latest local test
evidence, identify regressions, and return a short report. Do not modify files.

Plugin-level approval asks for human confirmation when an Agent creates or expands unattended future work. Read operations and a pause-only update do not add that extra approval step.

🧰 Good automation candidates

The best automations are repeatable, bounded, and easy to verify.

A strong task states the goal, evidence to inspect, allowed changes, verification, and stopping condition. Avoid prompts such as “continue what we discussed” or “fix everything”: scheduled runs do not inherit the conversation that created them.

🛡️ A schedule is not permission

Unattended coding needs a smaller trust boundary than an interactive chat. dsh-automation makes these constraints explicit:

• No inherited authority. A run receives no source-chat history, inbox, grant, or past approval.
• Two permission modes only. Rules may use read-only or workspace-write; unattended danger-full-access is not accepted.
• Fail closed. Each fresh Session uses approval policy never. A tool that still requires interactive approval fails instead of waiting forever or silently escalating.
• Exact workspace scope. Agent tools bind to the caller's canonical registered workspace; callers cannot supply an arbitrary target path.
• Explicit capability allowlist. The fresh Agent admits a small coding-tool set. Interactive questions, plans, goals, nested Agents, runtime plugin mounting, terminal/background jobs, recursive automation management, and unknown third-party tools are denied by an Agent-scoped final guard.
• Loopback Web control. The management RPC channel accepts loopback authority only.
• Traceable origin. The task enters the Session with source.kind = automation, plus the automation/run identity and scheduled time. It never impersonates a human message.
• No blind retries. Once an Agent may have produced side effects, the plugin does not automatically retry it.

These boundaries do not turn every third-party DSH tool into a sandbox. Foreground shell and network behavior still depends on the selected Agent preset, tool set, and DSH guards. Review a task with Run now before enabling unattended writes.

🔧 Technical details

⏱️ Scheduling and recovery semantics

A deterministic occurrence key prevents the scheduler from dispatching the same recorded occurrence twice. This is an at-most-once dispatch policy, not a claim that external side effects are exactly once.

The DSH Host must be running for a task to start. Version 0.1 is not an operating-system daemon and does not coordinate multiple Hosts over one storage directory.

flowchart LR
  UI["Web control center"] --> Service["Automation service"]
  Tools["Agent-scoped tools"] --> Service
  Service --> Definitions["Durable definitions"]
  Clock["Cordis-owned clock"] --> Claim["Durable occurrence claim"]
  Definitions --> Clock
  Claim --> Executor["Run executor"]
  Executor --> Agent["Fresh root Agent + Session"]
  Agent --> Runs["Durable run history"]
  Runs --> Service

⚙️ Configuration

The included cordis.patch.yml uses conservative defaults:

Edit the plugin row in the deployment profile if you need different values. Increasing concurrency or timeout expands the amount of unattended work; treat those changes as policy decisions.

🚧 Current limits

Version 0.1 deliberately does not provide:

• same-chat heartbeats — use DSH Core Schedule;
• raw cron or arbitrary shell actions;
• unattended full access;
• automatic retry of a run that may have side effects;
• Git worktree creation or cleanup;
• multi-workspace targets, DAGs, or hidden cross-run memory;
• external email, SMS, or push delivery;
• a guarantee of exactly-once external side effects.

Only local execution is implemented. A stable DSH worktree lifecycle service should exist before a UI toggle claims worktree isolation.

🧪 Development

pnpm typecheck
pnpm test
pnpm build
# or all three
pnpm check

The package builds a Host ESM bundle and a Web client bundle for DSH's window.__ModuleLoader__ contract. Tests cover recurrence and DST behavior, durable-domain invariants, Agent capability guards, scheduler overlap/recovery/retention, and client schedule/localization helpers.

📄 License

MIT. This is an independent community plugin for DeepSeek Harness. “Codex” is referenced only to describe the product pattern that informed the design.