dsh-novel-solo

A single-author novel-writing plugin for DeepSeek Harness: a subagent concurrency setting plus a complete novel-creation preset (persona). It is tuned for quantized small models — the tool catalog is slimmed and output behavior hardened — so you can run a full-length novel pipeline locally.

Features

• GUI setting: a "Subagent count (1-12)" card on the plugin page (0.1.7: left rail → Plugins; 0.1.6: Settings → Plugins), with built-in zh/en i18n.
• Full creation preset: ships the novel-solo preset with a self-driven persona that follows a fixed pipeline — 叙事方法 (narrative method) → 核心世界观 (core worldview) → 名词索引 (noun index) → 大纲 (outline) → 章节目录 (chapter list) → 人物档案 (character files) → chapter-by-chapter writing → per-chapter review → final whole-book review & assembly.
• Quantized-safe protocol: plain CJK + common punctuation only, no JSON, no escapes, avoids fragile tokens; minimal tool calls, one at a time.
• Review loop: every chapter is reviewed (green/yellow/red) across 7 dimensions (setting / character / catalog / narrative / text rules / AI-cliché / plot logic); each report is written to a markdown file; when all chapters pass, a whole-book review runs and the book is assembled.
• No AI clichés: judges AI-flavor across six dimensions (sentence templates / stock vocabulary / emotion telling / structural sameness / diluted information / character distortion), distinguishing narrator-level repetition from character-level consistency; shared by writing and review.
• Slimmed catalog: hard-disables whole tool rows (shell / jobs / skills / goals / web) inside the preset to shrink the tool schema.
• Versioned writing: each chapter is 第N章-章节名字-vX.md; full-chapter rewrites first copy to v(X+1) and never overwrite older drafts.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add "dsh-novel-solo"
dsh web

Then open the plugin page — Plugins in the left rail on 0.1.7, Settings → Plugins on 0.1.6 — and the dsh-novel-solo "Subagent count" card appears.

On hosts older than 0.1.7 the plugin additionally deploys the preset idempotently from template/ to <dshHome>/.agent-presets/novel-solo/, because that was the only preset contract there (an existing target is skipped — your edited preset is never overwritten). On 0.1.7 nothing is deployed: the preset arrives as a declarative row in the profile patch.

Host compatibility

The plugin supports DSH 0.1.6-alpha.1 / 0.1.6-alpha.2 and, from 0.1.7-alpha.1 on, every later host release and picks its route per host. Both halves probe the host's own version through ctx.profileContext.installAnchor — the YAML disabled: gate in cordis.patch.yml and the same check in lib/index.js — and fall back to the 0.1.6 route whenever the version cannot be read. Everything from 0.1.7 on takes the same route, 0.2.0 included.

	0.1.6	0.1.7 and later
Preset delivery	deploy template/ into <dshHome>/.agent-presets/novel-solo/	declarative @deepseek-ai/dsh-agent-preset row in the patch
Where N is saved	dsh-novel-solo settings namespace the plugin registers	the plugin's own Config (count is volatile), projected into the profile patch
Card slot	settings.plugin.item via settingsScope	plugins.item via configForms

Both routes are exercised against a real host; the 0.1.7 one on 0.1.7-rc.1 (card renders on the Plugins page, saves land in cordis.patch.yml, preset shows up in the picker). The 0.1.6 route is covered by the same version gate offline, since no 0.1.6 host binary is installed next to the 0.1.7 one. 0.1.7-rc.2, 0.2.0-rc.1, 0.2.0-rc.2 and 0.2.1-alpha.1 were checked against the host source at those releases rather than run: the preset row fields, the settings.configure / configForms seams, the plugins.item slot and profileContext.installAnchor all read the same as on 0.1.7-rc.1.

Whether the plugin loads at all is decided before its code runs: since 0.1.7-rc.1 the host evaluates every @deepseek-ai/dsh* range in peerDependencies against the running release and disables the row if one of them doesn't match. That list therefore ends in an open arm — >=0.1.7-alpha.1, with no upper bound — because nothing in this plugin is bound to a particular host build: its route is chosen by its own version gate at load time, so an unchecked release should still get a working plugin rather than lose one to a check that fails closed. The versions named before the open arm are the ones that were actually compared. The umbrella does not promise behavior across a contract change: the declarative preset row is the part a future host would break first, and the fix for that belongs in the patch file, not in the range. engines.dsh repeats the same list for readers — the host never parses it. Reinstalling on a host that previously refused the plugin needs a dsh web restart, since the decision is made while the profile is composed.

Since 0.1.5, the persona uses the @deepseek-ai/dsh-persona config key prefix (the text key of 0.1.2-rc.1 was removed), so hosts older than that need the persona row renamed by hand. Each home keeps its own deployed copy; homes provisioned by older hosts keep their text: copy and still work when you switch back.

How the subagent count takes effect

DSH's agent/request waterfall only lets a plugin rewrite LLM routing/config — it cannot inject or rewrite system/messages — so "GUI → model prompt" dynamic injection cannot go through the request waterfall. This plugin wires the value through files instead:

1. The card saves N into the host's settings store (see the table above). That is the source of truth.
2. On load, the node half mirrors it to <dshHome>/.dsh-novel-solo-data/agent-count.json.
3. The persona row resolves !!js while the preset loads: it reads template/persona.md and replaces that file's 并发上限 N=<number> anchor with the mirrored number. The persona then decides: N=1 the main agent does everything itself; N>1 writing/review tasks are delegated to subagents while the main agent only dispatches and silently waits.

Note: the mirror and the persona are both resolved while the host loads its plugins, so a GUI change reaches the prompt only after a host restart. Volatile settings give the node side no change callback, so there is nothing to push the new value out live.

Preset at a glance

The persona body lives in template/persona.md; template/agent.cordis.yml (mirrored into cordis.patch.yml) carries the tool rows around it. Content:

Section	Content
Division of labor	concurrency anchor N=1 (default), with N=1 / N>1 execution paths
Quantized-safe rules	top-priority constraints on output and tool calls
Six-doc standard structures	per-field templates for 叙事方法 / 核心世界观 / 名词索引 / 大纲 / 章节目录 / 人物档案
Writing & review rules	chapter rules, AI-cliché lists, A–G review dimensions + green/yellow/red, md review reports, whole-book review & assembly
Tool usage standards	per-tool rules for read/write/edit/glob/grep/subagent, etc.
Project & discipline	project dir {{cwd}}/项目名/, one thing at a time, etc.

Tool slimming

The preset hard-disables these rows via disabled: true: tool-bash, tool-jobs, skill-filesystem, tool-skill, tool-goal, plan-mode, subagent_codex, subagent_claude_code, workflow-worker-thread, tool-workflow, tool-ralph, tool-todo, tool-web. It keeps tool-fs (read/write/edit), tool-fs-search (glob/grep), str-replace-editor (view/create/str_replace/insert), tool-pwsh (filesystem management only: rename/delete files & folders), subagent/subagent_fork, list_agents, etc.

It also ships a preset-scoped vendored plugin (active only for sessions mounting the novel-solo preset):

• template/plugins/llm-tool-choice-pin/index.mjs, exported as dsh-novel-solo/plugins — pins toolChoice to auto for the llama provider so retained tools like edit stay callable (avoids per-request tool decisions under small models).

File structure

lib/index.js        node half: host version gate, count mirror, settings seam (0.1.7 volatile `Config` form / 0.1.6 namespace), preset deploy on legacy hosts
lib/client.js       browser half: the "Subagent count" card, mounted on `plugins.item` (0.1.7) and `settings.plugin.item` (0.1.6)
cordis.patch.yml    installed into the web profile: the plugin row plus the declarative novel-solo preset row (disabled below 0.1.7)
cordis.yml          development overlay: card only, no preset rows
template/           the novel-solo preset (agent.cordis.yml + persona.md + preset.yml + vendored plugin), shipped with the package
scripts/sync-preset-patch.mjs  copies template/agent.cordis.yml into the patch's generated block; `--check` verifies it
package.json        dsh.bundle / dsh.client metadata so the plugin is recognizable by the plugin market/manifest

npm run check syntax-checks both halves and re-runs the patch/template consistency check.

Environment variables

Variable	Purpose	Default
DSH_HOME	dsh home directory	~/.dsh
DSH_NOVEL_SKIP_DEPLOY	1 skips preset deployment (legacy hosts only)	none
DSH_NOVEL_REDEPLOY	1 forcibly overwrites an existing preset (use with care)	none

Test environment

This plugin was tested end-to-end with a local model:

• Runtime: llama.cpp (llama-b10615-bin-win-cuda-13.3-x64)
• Model: Qwen3.6-35B-A3B-Uncensored-HauhauCS-Aggressive-IQ4_XS.gguf
• Context: ctx=65536, reasoning on
• Hardware: laptop RTX 4060 8GB + 32GB RAM + AMD 7840H CPU
• Measured on a ~10k-char novel: 22 token/s, 98% cache hit; 78.8k input / 36.9k output / 2.3M cache; 22 turns / 63 steps, 1h03m42s total

Key server flags (llama-server):

llama-server.exe -m <model.gguf> --no-mmproj --load-mode none --n-cpu-moe 30 -c 65536 -ngl 999 -t 12 -b 1024 -ub 512 -ctk q8_0 -ctv q8_0 -fa on --fit off --no-warmup --poll 0 --temp 0.85 --top-k 20 --top-p 0.95 --min-p 0.05 --repeat-penalty 1.35 --presence-penalty 0.2 --frequency-penalty 0.2 --dry-multiplier 0.8 --dry-base 1.75 --jinja --reasoning on --reasoning-effort medium --reasoning-budget 2048 --reasoning-format deepseek --reasoning-preserve --cont-batching -np 1 --alias "qwen3.6-novel-nsfw-reason" --port 8090 --host 127.0.0.1 --ui --keep -1 --cache-ram 4096 --ctx-checkpoints 64

References

This plugin's design is inspired by sailoumili/novel-writer.

License

MIT License

Copyright (c) 2026 Tkingxiao

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.