moving-target

Cold-start context for DeepSeek Harness. Every new session, you re-explain your project's goal to the agent. Context files (AGENTS.md and friends) fix that — until they rot: every stale idea and abandoned decision in them contaminates every future session.

moving-target takes a different input: not a hand-maintained file, but the first prompt you sent to every past session in this workspace. Those prompts are the truest record of what the project is about. A bootstrap run distills them into one goal paragraph, saved in the workspace; from then on, every new session starts with that paragraph already injected.

How it works

1. moving-target-bootstrap extracts the first user prompt of every top-level session recorded for this workspace (~/.dsh/sessions/…, deterministic scan — no LLM involved).

2. The full DATE-TIME-PROMPT list is handed to the agent with one instruction: summarize the end goal of this project in one paragraph.

3. The agent returns the paragraph via the built-in moving_target_save_summary tool, which validates it and writes .moving-target/summary.md (metadata header + paragraph).

4. On every subsequent session start (startup only — resumed sessions are left alone), if .moving-target/summary.md exists in the workspace, the summary is injected as visible plugin context before your first prompt:

   Project goal (moving-target, bootstrapped 2026-08-23T03:41:07.000Z): <paragraph>

Not bootstrapped? Nothing happens — zero overhead.

Install

Plugins install per-profile. From this repo, pack a tarball and add it to your profile:

dsh plugin --profile <your-profile> add github:andrepontesmelo/moving-target

Or from a local checkout:

npm pack
cd ~/.dsh/profiles/<your-profile>
dsh plugin --profile <your-profile> add file:/path/to/moving-target-0.1.5.tgz

Mount it by adding an insert row to the profile's cordis.patch.yml:

- insert:
    - id: moving-target
      name: moving-target

Requirements: Node ≥ 22.6 (type-stripping) and the zstd binary on PATH. Sessions are read-only to moving-target; it never writes to the DSH store.

Usage

/moving-target-bootstrap

Run it once per workspace. It is re-runnable and overwrites — that is the escape hatch when the frozen summary drifts from reality (see caveats). After bootstrapping, do nothing; new sessions pick up the summary automatically.

To update the summary based on the current session outcome:

/moving-target-update

The current summary is read deterministically by the command and injected into the prompt — the agent never reads the file itself.

The standalone extractor CLI is available too:

npx moving-target-extract /path/to/workspace
# 2026-08-22 20:19 /wayfinder Here, in this folder, I want to implement…

.gitignore guidance

.moving-target/ is personal context distilled from your session history. Ignore it by default:

.moving-target/

Commit it deliberately only if the team agrees the summary should be shared (and re-bootstrapped collectively).

Caveats

• Summaries go stale; refresh deliberately. The summary is a snapshot of the project at bootstrap time; re-run /moving-target-bootstrap or run /moving-target-update to refresh it.
• Subagent sessions are excluded from extraction; only sessions where the first message came from a human count.
• The injected summary is model-facing context tagged plugin/instructions — visible in transcripts, but it is not a substitute for a real prompt.