DeepSeek Harness — Picture-in-Picture Chat

A browser plugin for the DeepSeek Harness Web GUI. It adds a compact chat that can stay above other windows, switch the active Harness session, follow streaming replies, and send a reply without returning to the full page.

Preview

Empty new chat, ready for the first message.

Active conversation with compact tool activity, progress docks, and reply controls.

Features

• Native Document Picture-in-Picture on supported Chromium browsers.
• In-page floating fallback when the Document Picture-in-Picture API is unavailable or denied.
• Session switcher with live working / waiting / completed state.
• Compact Markdown transcript with streaming reasoning, tool activity, results, historical images, copy, branch, and older-history loading.
• Stop generation plus queued-message edit, remove, and Send now controls.
• Inline approval, plan-review, and structured user-question panels.
• Image attachment previews and image-plus-text submission through the public session API.
• Access-mode, plan-mode, model, model reasoning-effort, and context controls inside the compact composer.
• Compact context, turns/steps, throughput, cache-hit, and input/output token statistics.
• Collapsible todo progress and active-goal status above the composer.
• Human chat switcher grouped by workspace, omitting internal subagent sessions.
• New-chat action that opens or creates the blank session for the current/recent workspace, including workspaces with no prior messages.
• Replies are sent through the public Session.prompt(..., "queue") API. While an agent is working, a reply is queued for the next turn and can be steered into the active turn with Send now.
• Reactive synchronization with the locale selected in Harness settings (English and Chinese), with Russian fallback copy for compatible hosts; dark-theme synchronization, keyboard, and screen-reader labels.
• Enter sends; Shift+Enter inserts a new line.

Switching a chat in the mini window calls ctx.sessions.open(id), so the main Harness window follows the same active chat.

Requirements

• DeepSeek Harness 0.1.0-rc.6 or a compatible release with client plugins and the shell.overlay slot.
• The Web profile (dsh web).
• For native always-on-top PiP: a Chromium browser supporting the Document Picture-in-Picture API. Other browsers use the in-page panel.

Install

From npm after publication:

dsh plugin --profile web add @syncended/dsh-pip

From this checkout during development:

dsh plugin --profile web add /absolute/path/to/deepseek-harness-picture-in-picture-plugin

Some pnpm-backed profiles require the workspace-root flag:

dsh plugin --profile web add -w /absolute/path/to/deepseek-harness-picture-in-picture-plugin

Restart dsh web after first installation. A chat-bubble button then appears in the bottom-right corner of the Web GUI.

Development

The published browser entry is deliberately dependency-free source in DSH's lazy client-module format; React and ReactDOM are resolved from the Web shell's platform module table.

npm run check
npm test
npm pack --dry-run

Tag-driven npm publication is documented in RELEASING.md.

The package has two faces:

• lib/index.js — no-op Host loader entry.
• lib/client.js — browser implementation registered in the additive shell.overlay slot.

package.json#dsh.client orders the client after runtime, layout, and conversation assembly. cordis.patch.yml inserts the package into the active profile.

Architecture notes

The full API investigation and design rationale are recorded in docs/RESEARCH.md.

The implementation uses only supported DSH client seams:

• ctx.slots.inject("shell.overlay", ...) for a lifecycle-safe floating UI contribution.
• ctx.sessions.list for the session list and current selection.
• ctx.sessions.open(id) to switch the active session.
• ctx.sessions.binding(id).session for conversation snapshots, projections, prompt/cancel/queue/history actions, and durable image reads.
• Pending interaction carriers from ConversationSnapshot.pending for approvals and structured questions.
• Public MarkdownText and writeClipboard primitives for safe transcript rendering and copy actions.
• react-dom#createPortal to render the same React mini-chat tree into the Document PiP window.

The PiP view uses a compact presentation rather than cloning the full Harness conversation component. It renders tool activity as concise logs and provides compact attachments, approvals, plan review, and ask_user_question controls; the main window remains available for full-size inspection.

Current limitations

• Document Picture-in-Picture is Chromium-only at the time of writing; other browsers use the in-page fallback.
• The operating system and browser own the native PiP window frame, outer corner shape, and final placement.
• Generic tool rows are intentionally compact; the main Harness window remains the best surface for deeply inspecting large tool payloads.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.