dsh-obvious-grid
Host plugin for DeepSeek Harness: makes session status obvious — visible from
across the room and reaching you when you are AFK. The harness itself serves an
ambient, glanceable status grid at /obvious-grid, and the plugin pushes to
ntfy (phone) and/or plays an alarm on the machine when a turn finishes,
an error occurs, or an approval is waiting on you.
Install
dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-obvious-grid # npm package name — resolved from the registry as-is
dsh plugin --profile web add @deepseek-ai/schemastery # the plugin's config schema; an optional peer, so pnpm won't auto-install it
dsh web # restart, then open http://localhost:3080/obvious-grid
That's it — the package ships a dsh.bundle manifest (its own
cordis.patch.yml), so dsh plugin add registers the plugin as a profile
layer automatically: no manual patch editing, no config file. dsh-obvious-grid
in the first command is the npm package name itself (published unscoped on
npmjs.com), so a fresh install needs no scope or repo prefix:
dsh plugin forwards the bare name to pnpm, which resolves it from the
registry and adds it to the profile's dependencies; the reconciler then
appends it to dsh.profile.bundles because the installed manifest declares
dsh.bundle. The second line installs @deepseek-ai/schemastery as a plain
dependency (it declares no dsh.bundle, hence the harmless "no dsh.bundle"
warning) — it is required at boot because the plugin's entry imports it
directly while declaring it only as an optional peer, and the web profile
template sets autoInstallPeers: false. (dsh plugin forwards pnpm, which
must be on PATH — it prints dsh: pnpm not found on PATH otherwise; for local
development a tarball or file: path works the same way, e.g.
dsh plugin --profile web add file:/path/to/dsh-obvious-grid.)
How to use
- Boot the harness:
dsh web (or restart a running instance), then open
http://localhost:3080/obvious-grid — the grid fills the viewport and
updates itself; nothing to click to get started.
- Read each session at a glance: the card tint is the state — orange
running (scrolling RUNNING marquee), blue waiting on you, red
error, green idle — and the card shows title, workspace · git branch,
model/provider, tokens, context %, cache hit %, speed, and time breakdown.
- Per-card controls: hide/restore a card, and toggle that session's
push (ntfy) and sound (alarm) — or flip the global switch to opt
all sessions in.
- To be reached when AFK, give the plugin a ntfy topic and/or an alarm
command — set them on the page, or statically in your profile patch (see
"User-specific config" below). You are notified on exactly three triggers:
a turn finishing, an error, and an approval waiting on you.
- Sanity check:
GET /obvious-grid/status must return JSON. If you get the
app's HTML shell instead, the plugin did not register — see Troubleshooting.

What you get
- Ambient grid page served by the harness itself at
/obvious-grid (web profile):
distance-readable cards that fill the viewport, the whole card tinted by state:
orange = running (with a giant scrolling RUNNING marquee), blue = waiting /
blocked on you (flashing attention), red = error, green = idle. Cards
show the session title (folded from the log-only session/title event, seeded
from ctx.sessionTitle at adoption), workspace path · git branch (read from
.git/HEAD up the directory tree), model/provider, per-request tokens
(current request) + session totals, reasoning tokens (usage-reported when the
adapter provides them, otherwise counted from the token-sized
reasoning-delta stream chunks — the harness's own token boundaries),
context-window % (the RAW prompt
footprint of the newest measured request — uncached input + cache read over
the window, NOT the session-cumulative cache total which would inflate the
gauge to 100%+), prompt-cache hit % (last request | session average),
token/s speed (last | average), per-state time breakdown (run/wait/idle/err)
- pid + llm time in the meta line, sub-agent
↳ + parent line, per-card
sound/notify toggles, hide/restore, and live per-request graphs (token usage
stacked bars + token/s rate and average lines, hover for per-request detail
with cumulative totals).
Zero interaction required; the page polls /obvious-grid/status and stays live.
The state follows the session’s open turn: running covers the whole
turn — each step, the gaps between steps (tool calls), and compaction
(compaction/start..compaction/end) included — so the grid never flickers
to idle between steps, and a manual /compact between turns shows as running
while the summary is being produced. Idle only when no turn is open.
- AFK notifications on exactly three triggers (obvious-grid semantics):
turn-end — a turn finished, come look;
error — agent/error on the live bus;
approval-wait — an approval/asked is parked, you are the blocker.
Each trigger pushes to ntfy (phone) and/or plays an alarm on the machine.
Per-session opt-in toggles + a global topic, changed from the page; a global
notifyDefault switch in config opts all sessions in.
- History resumes across restarts: DSH never rebroadcasts constructor
seeds (replay/fork/resume) on the
session/event firehose, so the registry
folds each session's full event log (session.events) once at adoption —
turns/steps/tokens/title from before a harness restart reappear. Live
appends keep coming from the firehose, and the two sources are disjoint (no
double counting).
- Nothing new to run: no own HTTP server (routes register on the harness
webserver), no temp-file registry, no PID liveness / staleness window. The
page file is read fresh per request, so UI edits appear on a browser refresh
without a harness restart.
Config
| Key |
Default |
Meaning |
ntfyUrl |
https://ntfy.sh |
ntfy server base |
topic |
"" |
ntfy topic. Empty = push disabled (page can set it at runtime) |
notifyOn |
[turn-end, error, approval-wait] |
which triggers push |
notifyDefault |
false |
notify sessions that have no explicit per-session flag |
alarmCmd |
"" |
optional alarm shell command; unset = silent |
minIntervalMs |
5000 |
per-session push throttle |
pageEnabled |
true |
mount the /obvious-grid routes (web profile) |
Runtime user config (topic + per-session toggles) lives in
$DSH_HOME/obvious-grid.json and is editable from the page
(POST /obvious-grid/notify).
User-specific config (optional)
Per-user settings — your ntfy topic, alarmCmd, push defaults — belong in
the profile's own patch layer $DSH_HOME/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml as an
id-targeted override (only the keys you set are needed):
- id: obvious-grid
config:
topic: my-dsh-alerts # ntfy topic; push is off until set
notifyOn: [turn-end, error, approval-wait]
notifyDefault: false # true = notify all sessions unless overridden
alarmCmd: "" # e.g. paplay /usr/share/sounds/freedesktop/stereo/complete.oga
minIntervalMs: 5000 # max one push per session per interval
ntfyUrl: https://ntfy.sh
pageEnabled: true
Note for setups from before v0.2.0: if you previously registered the plugin by
hand via an insert row in your profile patch, remove that row after
upgrading — it duplicates the bundle's own insert.
Endpoints (web profile)
| Route |
Description |
GET /obvious-grid |
the ambient page (plain HTML file, zero build) |
GET /obvious-grid/status |
JSON snapshot of live sessions |
GET /obvious-grid/notify |
current topic + per-session flags |
POST /obvious-grid/notify |
set topic and/or toggle one session |
Troubleshooting
file: / tarball installs are snapshots, not live links. pnpm copies the
package at install time, so after changing the source repo you must reinstall
(re-run dsh plugin --profile web add file:/path/to/dsh-obvious-grid) —
otherwise the installed copy silently keeps stale files. The npm-package
install (dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-obvious-grid) avoids this.
- Bundle not active after a
dsh plugin command? The reconciler maintains
dsh.profile.bundles from installed state — the entry is added when the
installed package declares dsh.bundle, and removed when it doesn't. If
your copy is stale (see above), the manifest may be missing: refresh the
install, then check dsh.profile.bundles in the profile's package.json
contains dsh-obvious-grid.
- Quick sanity check:
/obvious-grid/status must return JSON. If it
returns the SPA shell (DeepSeek Harness app HTML) instead, the plugin did not
register — check the two bullets above.
Files
dsh-obvious-grid/
lib/index.js plugin entry: name, Config (schemastery), apply()
lib/sessions.js live per-session fold of the session firehose
lib/notify.js ntfy push + bounded alarm subprocess + user config store
lib/page.html the ambient grid page (plain file, no template processing)
cordis.patch.yml bundle patch layer (dsh.bundle manifest) — auto-registers the
plugin on `dsh plugin add`, no manual patch editing
scripts/check-page-script.mjs syntax-checks the page's embedded <script>
scripts/seeder.mjs test seeder: creates a multi-session grid (parent +
sub-agent + extra session) in an isolated profile to
exercise several cards without touching a live instance
Safety rules
- No top-level side effects;
apply(ctx, config) does all wiring.
fetch is always bounded (AbortController, 3 s); the alarm subprocess is
detached, unref'd, stdio ignored, killed after 5 s — it can never hang
the harness.
- All file config I/O swallows errors; a broken store must not break the page.
lib/page.html is a plain file — no template processing. The embedded script
uses only string concatenation (no template literals), and npm run check
syntax-checks it.
Limits
- Cards show tokens and wall times, not $ — DSH does not report message
cost today. If providers expose usage cost later, it drops into the same fold.
- The grid shows the serving instance's live sessions. A machine-wide grid over
several concurrent
dsh processes would scan the shared canonical logs under
$DSH_HOME — deliberately deferred.
Verify
npm run check # node --check on lib/*.js + the extracted page script
Verification limits: this package was written against the published
@deepseek-ai package contracts (dsh-session-telemetry event subscription,
dsh-host-webserver route registration, dsh-session-title-first-prompt-llm
plugin shape, dsh-session-stats event vocabulary) and has been live-loaded
against DSH rc.6 in this environment: boot failed until the loader entry declared
inject: [sessions, webServer, sessionTitle] (cordis forbids touching
undeclared services), and apply() now reads services through a guarded
accessor so a missing service degrades instead of killing the boot. A
multi-session grid (parent + sub-agent + second session, waiting + idle states)
is exercised by scripts/seeder.mjs in an isolated profile. A load failure
still surfaces in the Loader log; the Logger row message names the missing
export, schema field, or service.
License
MIT. Idea and page design derive from
ray062/opencode-obvious-grid (MIT).