dsh-skill-bundle

A plugin for DeepSeek Harness that groups related skills into bundle boxes. Each box has one root skill and any number of sub-skills; a box loads either by frontmatter metadata (loadSubskills) or by letting the model decide from the body text.

It ships as a self-activating Harness bundle: installing the npm package adds a patch layer that inserts the plugin row, so no manual patching or symlinking is needed.

Why it exists

Harness already lets a model load skills on demand, which works well for a few unrelated skills. A family of related skills — a toolchain, a phased workflow, a project with several sub-tasks — has a real cost under the naive approach:

Every installed skill contributes a model-invocable name and description to the <available_skills> catalog on each relevant prompt. A group installed as flat siblings therefore expands that catalog (and the prompt budget it consumes) even when the current task never touches the group. A loaded skill body only enters context after a tool or slash invocation, but the summaries of every sibling are always present — wasting tokens, bloating the context window, breaking KV-cache reuse, and slowing every turn.

Two symptoms follow:

1. Context pollution — unrelated groups still consume prompt budget through their catalog summaries.
2. Unnecessary questions — with many sibling summaries in-context, the model drifts into asking which piece to use instead of just working.

dsh-skill-bundle makes loading explicit and on-demand:

• A group (a bundle box) is exposed as one small root skill.
• Its sub-skills are not catalogued up front. They load only when the box is pulled in via loadSubskills — and then only the ones listed.
• Nothing from the group is in context until you ask for it.

You can opt out per box: without loadSubskills, the box returns its short root body and the model follows that text, fine for boxes you actually want always-present.

Example — a "deploy" bundle

Three steps per deploy: build, push, rollback. Wrap them in one box:

boxes/deploy/
  SKILL.md          # root skill, frontmatter has `loadSubskills`
  build/SKILL.md
  push/SKILL.md
  rollback/SKILL.md

With loadSubskills, telling the model to use deploy loads all three sub-skill bodies at once — it immediately has the build/push/rollback instructions and can run the whole deploy without asking "which one?".

Without it, deploy returns just its short body text and the model reads and follows that.

Features

• Bundle box — a directory with a root SKILL.md plus sibling sub-skill directories, each with its own SKILL.md.

• Two load rules, decided by the root skill's frontmatter:

  Root frontmatter	On load the box produces
  loadSubskills: true	every sub-skill body, in directory order (root body ignored)
  loadSubskills: [a, b]	sub-skill a + b bodies only, in that order (root body ignored)
  no loadSubskills	root body as-is; model decides from its text

• Each expanded sub-skill keeps its own identity and resource directory: the body is rendered as a skill_content block whose resource base is the child's own directory, so relative paths inside it resolve correctly.

• Invalid loadSubskills values fail loudly (wrong type, unknown child name, or a duplicate name) instead of silently producing partial content.

• Model-facing tools: skill_browse (list a box's sub-skill names — summaries only), skill_load (load one or more skills by exact name), plus the standard skill tool for root invocation.

• No framework changes — a plain Cordis plugin.

Requirements

• A working DeepSeek Harness installation (dsh), e.g. dsh --profile web.

Install

The package is a Harness bundle: it declares dsh.bundle and ships a prebuilt lib/ plus the default boxes/, so no build toolchain is needed on the installing machine.

dsh plugin --profile web add @lihuu/dsh-skill-bundle
dsh --profile web --dump-config

The second command must show a dsh-skill-bundle layer. A running profile must be restarted after bundle membership changes.

Using your own boxes

By default the plugin resolves boxes beside its installed package (boxes/). To point it at your own directory, add a later patch row (profile or home level) that replaces the inserted row with the same id/name and an absolute boxesDir:

- insert:
    - id: dsh-skill-bundle
      name: '@lihuu/dsh-skill-bundle'
      config:
        boxesDir: /absolute/path/to/your/boxes

Harness patch rows replace complete config values instead of deep-merging them, so re-state every field you need.

Building from source (developers)

npm install        # installs typescript + dev dependencies
npm run build      # tsc compiles src/ -> lib/
npm test           # build + node --test tests/*.test.mjs

lib/ and node_modules/ are git-ignored; they are rebuilt, not committed.

Activation semantics

• Each box contributes one model-invocable root candidate.
• Child candidates stay hidden from the model catalog (modelInvocable: false) and remain directly user-invocable through Harness slash invocation.
• A root with no loadSubskills returns its own body unchanged.
• loadSubskills: true expands every immediate child in deterministic (directory-name) order.
• loadSubskills: [name, ...] expands exactly those children in the declared order and ignores the root body.
• Children do not become new model-visible catalog rows after activation; skill_load is the model tool for exact hidden-child loading.

Creating a skill bundle

A box is just a directory. For example the shipped dsh-skill-bundle-guides box:

boxes/
  dsh-skill-bundle-guides/
    SKILL.md              # root skill
    install-plugin/SKILL.md
    create-bundle/SKILL.md
    bundle-from-skills/SKILL.md
    fix-frontmatter/SKILL.md

Every SKILL.md needs name + description in its frontmatter:

---
name: dsh-skill-bundle-guides
description: "Guides for using this plugin."
loadSubskills:          # optional: auto-load these sub-skills
  - install-plugin
  - create-bundle
  - bundle-from-skills
  - fix-frontmatter
---

Body text (ignored when loadSubskills is present).

Sub-skills are ordinary skills too:

---
name: install-plugin
description: "How to install dsh-skill-bundle."
---

How to install the plugin...

YAML gotcha

YAML 1.2 (used by this plugin) rejects a plain scalar that looks like a "compact mapping". If a value — e.g. description — contains a comma next to a colon (a: x, b, c), wrap it in double quotes:

description: "a, b, c: needs quoting because of the comma/colon"

License

MIT