DSH Doctor

Deterministic diagnostics and recovery for DeepSeek Harness.

DSH Doctor is the safety net for the two ways a Harness usually breaks itself: it cannot converse (the Web UI opens but the loop is broken), or it cannot start (boot fails after a config, dependency, or plugin change). When the Web UI still opens, the Doctor button calls a loopback-only Host recovery service. When Harness cannot start, the same engine runs as a standalone CLI — including a boot probe that captures the failure and a one-click reset to the last healthy checkpoint, so plugin developers can experiment and always get back to a working state.

DSH Doctor 0.2.0 targets @deepseek-ai/dsh 0.1.0-rc.6. DeepSeek Harness is a developer preview; unknown versions are scanned in conservative read-only mode.

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Install

Add Doctor to the Web profile:

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-doctor
dsh --profile web

This installs one package with both Host and browser halves. It contributes:

• a persistent Doctor action beside Settings in the sidebar;
• an automatic recovery banner above the composer after a prompt or Agent failure;
• a full Doctor page in Settings with findings, checkpoints, and rollback;
• a floating emergency entry that appears in the frame overlay whenever the profile is broken, independent of the sidebar and conversation plugins.

If the Web UI cannot start:

npx dsh-doctor recover --profile web

CLI

# Scan one profile (offline and path-anonymized by default)
npx dsh-doctor scan

# Probe whether the Harness can boot and diagnose the failure from its output
npx dsh-doctor boot

# One-click recovery: reset configs to the healthy checkpoint, reconcile
# dependencies, then verify the boot again
npx dsh-doctor recover --profile web
npx dsh-doctor recover --profile web --yes   # also apply confirmed actions

# Snapshot the current profile as a healthy recovery baseline
npx dsh-doctor checkpoint --profile web

# Start the Harness; diagnose automatically when it fails to boot
npx dsh-doctor launch --auto-recover

# Restore a checkpoint
npx dsh-doctor rollback <checkpoint-id>

recover runs the safe actions with zero confirmation, then verifies the result by booting the Harness when it was down. The exit status is 1 when errors remain (or boot verification fails), warnings return 0 unless --strict is used, and invalid arguments or internal failures return 2. JSON output is available with --json.

What v0.2.0 checks

• Node, platform, Harness version and profile discovery;
• profile manifest, bundle shape, cordis.yml, cordis.patch.yml, and pnpm workspace syntax and permissions;
• missing dependencies, duplicate bundles, and broken profile links;
• live Cordis plugin phases when called from the Web UI;
• boot failures via a real boot probe (port watch + captured output mapped to repair actions);
• session records (session.jsonl.zstd) and storage caches for corruption;
• recent local fatal/plugin-failure log markers;
• non-registry and external plugin sources (flagged, but never blocking recovery);
• model route/credential state and an optional, tiny, non-session probe that verifies the model actually answers.

Recovery

Every mutation follows the same transaction:

1. Re-check the plan expiry and hashes of profile files.
2. Create a private pre-repair checkpoint.
3. Apply only selected actions.
4. Run a fresh structural scan (and boot verification when the Harness was down).
5. Roll back automatically when verification fails.

Safe one-click actions prepare Doctor state and reset the profile configuration to the latest healthy checkpoint. On a cold start with no healthy checkpoint, Doctor can synthesize minimal valid config files — after explicit confirmation, with the broken originals preserved in the pre-repair checkpoint. Dependency installation, disabling a boot-crashing plugin, quarantining a corrupt session file, and re-enabling a Doctor-disabled plugin require explicit confirmation. Doctor refuses to disable the connection, layout, settings, conversation, runtime, module-loader, or Doctor rescue entries.

Checkpoints are stored locally under $DSH_HOME/doctor/checkpoints/, with ten retained per profile and the newest healthy checkpoint always kept. They may contain exact copies of local configuration so that rollback is byte-accurate; they are never included in reports or uploaded. API keys are never printed, changed, or sent by Doctor.

See Recovery matrix and Security policy.

Development

Requires Node 24 and pnpm.

pnpm install
pnpm check
npm pack --dry-run

License

MIT