Work Charter for DeepSeek Harness

简体中文

work-charter-dsh—the Work Charter DSH Plugin (WCDP)—brings Work Charter to DeepSeek Harness (DSH).

Work Charter is a lightweight governance layer for consequential agent work. It turns an open-ended request into an explicit, recoverable contract: what outcome is intended, what authority exists, who may write, what evidence is required, which decisions remain open, when work must stop, and what must be revalidated before it resumes.

WCDP keeps that policy model and adapts its integration to DSH. It is not a different charter system and does not assume that users already know the Codex Skill. The main difference is the Harness surface: the Codex edition is a Codex Skill, while WCDP is an external DSH bundle with Host-owned policy state, DSH model tools and runtime context, and an additive read-only browser Client.

Status: public GitHub Pre-release v0.1.0-alpha.1, qualified only on the exact DSH/SCDP graph documented below. The source is public, but the package remains private: true and is not published to npm.

What a Work Charter does

A Charter keeps the contract smaller than the work it protects. Routine work does not need one. For consequential, interrupted, multi-Session, or authority-sensitive work, a Charter makes these responsibilities explicit:

• Outcome and boundaries — the intended result, non-goals, and protected scope;
• Authority — what has actually been approved, at which revision, without converting discussion into permission;
• Roles and writer ownership — who is coordinating, implementing, or assessing, with one active writer;
• Evidence and acceptance — what was tested or observed, what remains UNKNOWN, and who may accept the result;
• Decisions and recovery — what blocks progress, when to pause, how to resume safely, and how to recover after interruption or drift.

The contract separates four kinds of information so implementation details do not silently become permanent requirements:

1. Confirmed Contract — user-confirmed outcomes, acceptance, and exclusions;
2. Necessary Guardrails — permissions, safety, reversibility, trust, and compatibility boundaries;
3. Working Proposal — replaceable tools, files, algorithms, and execution steps;
4. Assumptions / Open Decisions — uncertainty that must not be promoted to fact without a decision.

Work Charter supports progressively stronger coordination rather than forcing every task into a large workflow:

• L0: ordinary work with no active Charter;
• L1 / current-task: one bounded Charter in the current task;
• L2 / durable-single-agent: one agent plus a durable recovery anchor;
• L3 / planner-executor: separate planning or assessment from the sole writer;
• L4 / standard-ope: Orchestrator, Planner, and Executor responsibilities for governed multi-phase work.

A higher level adds coordination and recovery protection, not action authority. A Charter never grants filesystem, shell, Git, network, installation, publication, or other external-effect permission.

Same policy, different Harness

WCDP is bound to the independently versioned Codex Work Charter v0.3.0 baseline. It preserves the core policy concepts while using DSH-native extension points:

WCDP does not replace DSH goals, plans, workflows, approvals, Sessions, subagents, sandboxing, the agent loop, or Trajectory. The Host is authoritative only for Charter policy state and transition validity. Browser components are presentation and navigation affordances, not enforcement or an identity boundary.

Why WCDP requires session-coordinator-dsh

Work Charter policy and cross-Session coordination are separate responsibilities. The targeted DSH version supplies Sessions and persistence, but it does not expose the complete Workstream-level addressing, correlation, delivery, disposition, and recovery contract that WCDP needs. That missing coordination layer is provided by session-coordinator-dsh (SCDP).

Work Charter policy semantics
            |
            v
work-charter-dsh (WCDP)
  Charter state, authority, roles, writer, evidence,
  decisions, transitions, acceptance, and recovery policy
            |
            v
session-coordinator-dsh (SCDP)
  Workstream identity, Session membership and addressing,
  immutable coordination records, delivery, and reconciliation
            |
            v
DeepSeek Harness
  Sessions, storage, tools, skills, approvals, UI, and agent runtime

WCDP consumes only SCDP's public service contract. It does not import or modify SCDP implementation internals, and it does not reimplement SCDP's transport or coordination ledger. SCDP likewise does not decide Charter policy: WCDP determines whether a Result Notice or disposition is valid for the active Charter; SCDP addresses, records, delivers, and reconciles that message.

SCDP is therefore a required runtime dependency, not an optional integration. The packaged DSH profile patch mounts SCDP before WCDP so the coordination service exists before the policy service activates. Missing or uncertain coordination state fails closed instead of being treated as permission to continue.

DSH surfaces

The alpha bundle provides:

• a strict TypeScript Host state machine and plugin-owned storage domain;
• compare-and-set Charter and authority revisions with fail-closed role, writer, evidence, decision, Result Notice, disposition, and close checks;
• the DSH Skill work-charter and five model tools for status, draft creation, transition, Result Notice submission, and disposition return;
• bounded active/paused Charter context persisted through the DSH Session log;
• typed same-process Host interfaces and a deliberately read-only browser Remote;
• additive global and per-Session UI actions plus a read-only Charter overlay.

The candidate cannot govern, approve, accept, or evaluate itself. Independent assessment remains independent even when WCDP enforces the mechanics of role and transition separation.

Exact qualified release graph

The current compatibility claim is exact and artifact-bound:

• work-charter-dsh@0.1.0-alpha.1;
• session-coordinator-dsh@0.1.1-alpha.1, public contract 3, logical schema 2;
• official DSH dsh-v0.1.2-alpha.1, commit cd5ef8148158c3a752a658978873241fdf8e2bbc.

No DSH version range is implied. Later prereleases, registry-backed installation, other storage providers, multi-process or cross-host operation, and production support remain unqualified.

Install from the GitHub Pre-release artifacts

Neither WCDP nor its exact SCDP dependency is published to npm. Download and checksum-verify these two GitHub Pre-release assets:

• session-coordinator-dsh-0.1.1-alpha.1.tgz;
• work-charter-dsh-0.1.0-alpha.1.tgz.

Add both tarballs to the same profile of an exact dsh-v0.1.2-alpha.1 installation. Run from the directory containing both files and replace <profile> with an existing profile such as web or headless:

dsh plugin --profile <profile> add .\session-coordinator-dsh-0.1.1-alpha.1.tgz .\work-charter-dsh-0.1.0-alpha.1.tgz
dsh --profile <profile> --dump-default-config

SCDP intentionally installs as a plain profile dependency and may emit an orientation warning because it declares no dsh.bundle; WCDP is the bundle layer. The configuration dump should show SCDP mounted before WCDP. Do not use an npm or Git-checkout substitution for this qualified alpha graph.

What has—and has not—been verified

On the exact graph above, frozen/offline producers created reproducible release artifacts, a fresh consumer passed strict typechecking and real Loader/runtime tests, and a real Chromium smoke test exercised the additive UI. A dedicated packed-consumer standard-ope run started distinct DSH Orchestrator, Planner, and Executor AgentLoops and carried the complete O→P→E result/disposition chain through WCDP and SCDP with durable acknowledged delivery.

This establishes bounded base-runtime and L4 mechanism behavior for the exact alpha graph. It does not establish broad DSH compatibility, natural-language model quality, causal improvement in project outcomes, full native-feature UI semantics, npm installability, or general Work Charter efficacy. No controlled baseline comparison or independent semantic-efficacy assessment has been run.

The qualified work-charter-dsh-0.1.0-alpha.1.tgz bytes are a checksum-bound packaging-time snapshot. Its bundled 52-line README predates publication and still says that the tag and GitHub Release do not yet exist. This repository documentation update does not replace, alter, or re-sign the 98,593-byte artifact that was published and verified. Use its published checksum—not the asset name or URL alone—to identify those qualified bytes, and use the repository README for current release status.

License and project navigation

Licensed under the MIT License. The browser bundle's included dependency notices are recorded in THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md.

• Product specification
• Current status and recovery entry
• Verification method, evidence, and limitations