🍷 dsh-palate — an eye that grows

中文说明 · DeepSeek Harness plugin

Design-audit tools measure with a fixed ruler. dsh-palate trains an eye that grows.

Most design-review plugins ship a static ruleset and apply it forever — use them once or a thousand times, the judgment is identical. dsh-palate is the opposite: it keeps a taste corpus that accumulates. Every example you feed it and every principle you distill sharpens the judgment your agent draws on. The more you use it, the better its eye gets.

Why this exists

Taste is not a gift — it's pattern recognition built from exposure. See enough good and bad design, and the rules emerge. dsh-palate turns that into a mechanism an agent can actually use:

1. Observe — inspect a screenshot, URL, or design and name concrete visual evidence
2. Stage — turn that analysis into examples and principles that wait in a reviewable candidate queue
3. Confirm — only an explicit accept/reject decision changes the corpus; rejected ideas stay visible without changing taste
4. Review — critique a new design against the accumulated taste, not a generic checklist
5. Calibrate — record which recommendations actually helped; only confirmed helpful principles gain evidence, so the palate compounds honestly

What the agent gets

Ships with a starter palate of 12 foundational principles plus four transparent teaching examples (good and bad dashboards, a readable table, and generic landing-page boilerplate), so the first review has concrete evidence — then it grows from there.

The four starter examples are inserted only when the local taste database is empty. Installing or upgrading the plugin never overwrites an existing palate.

Visual reference packs: Apple and X

dsh-palate also ships two opt-in visual-reference packs:

• apple-product-storytelling — one product subject per viewport, proof-led imagery, restrained CTA choices, and a calm sequence of mini-campaigns.
• x-direct-utility — high-contrast identity, a decisive primary route, ranked secondary actions, and almost invisible supporting detail.

They are transparent abstractions of public pages observed on 2026-08-27, not scraped assets, brand copy, or templates to imitate. Start by calling palate_packs, then explicitly apply one or both with palate_seed. Use tag: "apple" or tag: "x" in palate_review: the tag filters both matching examples and style-scoped principles, while universal principles remain available.

For example, ask an agent:

Inspect palate_packs, then apply apple-product-storytelling and x-direct-utility with palate_seed. Review our product-launch page with tag apple, and separately review our sign-in entry flow with tag x. Cite the evidence; do not copy either brand’s assets, copy, or identity.

Visual training desk: observe → compare → confirm

palate_intake is deliberately a staging tool, not a hidden auto-learning button. First have the agent inspect a screenshot or page with a browser/vision capability. Then it records a compact, structured analysis: hierarchy, typography, color, spacing, interaction, and any other relevant dimension. The intake creates one example candidate plus any proposed principles; none are added to the corpus yet.

It can also record an explicit comparison with Apple, X, or future reference packs:

• aligned — the observed evidence supports named abstract reference principles
• conflicts — the evidence conflicts with named reference principles
• insufficient_evidence — the screenshot/page does not show enough to judge

Comparing against a pack that has not been seeded is allowed for research, but the record is marked reference-only and does not activate or inject the pack. This keeps analysis separate from style adoption.

Use palate_candidates to show the evidence and candidate IDs to the user. Only after they clearly say accept or reject should the agent call palate_decide. Accepted records preserve their training-session provenance; rejected records remain in training.md so a team can revisit the judgment later.

How it works

inspect screenshot / URL with vision or browser
        │
        ▼
palate_intake (structured observations + pack comparison)
        │
        ▼
pending example / principle candidates ──▶ palate_candidates ──▶ user explicitly accepts or rejects
        │                                                                  │
        └──────────────────────────── palate_decide ◀─────────────────────┘
                                           │
                   accepted only ─────────┼───────── rejected stays auditable in training.md
                                           ▼
                    taste corpus + codified principles
                                           │
palate_review (a design) ──▶ review_id + learned evidence ──▶ agent writes grounded critique
        ▲                                                               │
        └── palate_feedback (accept/reject + why) ──▶ effectiveness + accepted-principle evidence ─┘

• Storage: node:sqlite (built into Node ≥ 22) at $DSH_HOME/palate/, plus human-readable taste.md / principles.md / feedback.md / training.md mirrors. Zero runtime dependencies.
• Retrieval: a review ranks examples against the current description using local words, tags, and Chinese word fragments; when no precedent is relevant, it leaves the evidence empty instead of padding with recent entries.
• Feedback loop: every palate_review snapshots its evidence; palate_feedback records the outcome, while feedback.md and the panel show actual acceptance/rejection data.
• The panel: a draggable overlay shows examples studied, principles distilled, the visual-training queue, recent review subjects, the exact example refs cited by each review, and recent judgments.
• Vision pairing: inspect screenshots with a vision tool first (e.g. modlens_read_image) or pages with a browser, then pass the evidence to palate_intake or palate_review. The plugin never fetches, screenshots, or claims to see a raw URL by itself.

Honest framing

This is accumulated retrieval + codified principles + explicit decisions and feedback, not model fine-tuning. The plugin supplies learned taste as context; the model renders the critique. palate_intake does not count as learning: only a user-confirmed palate_decide adds a candidate, and only a user/agent-confirmed palate_feedback adds effectiveness evidence. That keeps judgment auditable through taste.md, principles.md, feedback.md, and training.md without retraining anything.

Install — copy, paste, confirm

# GitHub is the supported release channel.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:guo6x/dsh-palate

Restart a running dsh web process, then refresh the page. Installation is complete when a 👁️ button appears at the bottom of the sidebar. Click it to see the starter palate, its principles, feedback history, and any staged training candidates.

Requirements: the DeepSeek Harness web profile and Node ≥ 22. The plugin itself uses only local SQLite storage — it does not need an account, API key, or embedding service. The natural-language chat demo still uses the model configured in Harness, so that provider must have a valid credential.

Developing from a checkout instead? Run dsh plugin --profile web add . from the repository directory. The repository commits the lib/ entrypoints, so GitHub and path installs can start immediately without running an install-time build script.

First-run proof in 60 seconds

Use this short path to verify the install before teaching the palate:

1. Install with the command above, restart dsh web, and open a new chat. If the composer asks for a workspace, click Choose workspace, select or create one, and continue the one-time notice if it appears.

2. Make sure the selected Harness model has a valid provider credential, then paste this prompt:

   Call palate_stats, then use palate_review to critique “a dashboard with twelve equal KPI cards, one primary revenue metric, and a small trend chart”. Tell me which stored principles and examples you used, and return the review_id.

3. Confirm the response contains the starter principles, grounded evidence, and a review_id. Open the 👁️ panel: the review should also appear there.

This proves the plugin path — host discovery, local storage, retrieval, and Web rendering. The plugin does not make a remote model request itself, but the chat response does depend on the selected Harness provider. If the response reports an authentication error, verify the 👁️ panel and local counters first; the plugin can be installed correctly while the model credential is invalid. To see the corpus grow, follow the 90-second loop below and add palate_feedback only after you have actually judged the recommendation.

For a copyable keyless transcript, Web-panel success signals, and a failure matrix, see the first-run demo.

See the learning loop in 90 seconds

Start a new chat and paste this safe, local-first task:

Build our first taste record for a dense analytics dashboard. Use palate_add to save one bad example: “all 12 KPI cards have equal visual weight, so the decision signal is buried”; tag it dashboard, hierarchy. Then use palate_review to critique “an analytics dashboard with twelve equal KPI cards, one primary revenue metric, and a small trend chart.” Explain which learned principles you used.

The response should name the matched record and starter principles instead of applying a generic checklist. Open the 👁️ panel to see the example count grow and the new review appear. If you adopt a recommendation, ask the agent to record palate_feedback for that review; only confirmed helpful principles gain evidence.

Try the training desk safely

After the agent has actually inspected a screenshot or page, paste this task:

Analyze the inspected product landing page with palate_intake. Record at least hierarchy, typography, color, spacing, and interaction observations; stage one example candidate and up to two concrete principle candidates. Compare it with apple-product-storytelling as aligned, conflicts, or insufficient_evidence, citing the exact reference principle(s). Show me the pending candidates and do not call palate_decide until I explicitly choose accept or reject.

The 👁️ panel should show a new training session and pending count, while the example and principle totals stay unchanged. Once you make an explicit decision, the agent can call palate_decide; training.md preserves both the analysis and the result.

If the 👁️ button is missing

• Confirm the plugin is installed in the web profile: dsh plugin --profile web list dsh-palate.
• Restart the dsh web process after installing; a browser refresh alone cannot load new host code.
• Check that Node is version 22 or newer. The plugin has no additional runtime dependency to install.

Develop

pnpm install
node build.mjs        # esbuild → lib/index.js (host ESM) + lib/client.js (ModuleLoader bundle)
node tests/smoke.mjs  # pure-logic checks (no browser needed)

MIT licensed. Ideas and examples welcome — open an issue.

Known limitations

• No embedding-based semantic matching in the plugin itself — it retrieves locally by tags, words, and Chinese word fragments; the model does the deeper reasoning from the assembled context.
• Feedback is explicit — the plugin does not guess whether a user adopted a recommendation; call palate_feedback after a review to form effectiveness data.
• Training decisions are explicit — palate_intake stages evidence but does not inspect a raw URL/image or learn automatically; palate_decide needs a clear human accept/reject decision.
• Markdown mirrors are read-only exports (human edit-and-merge-back is planned).
• Vision is delegated — pair with a vision tool to inspect screenshots, or a browser to inspect URLs, before staging evidence.
• Reference packs are not cloning kits — they preserve observable layout and hierarchy lessons, not protected assets, copy, or a promise that every page from a referenced brand is appropriate for every product.