DeepSeek Harness: an open-source, MIT-licensed Claude Code rival
The V4 team ships an 'everything is a plugin' agent framework you can run tonight, fork freely, and repoint at any model — four modes, one npx command.
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Model + harness = agent, and the harness is now yours
DeepSeek split the coding agent in two — the model (the 'soul') and the harness that gives it tools, shell, file edits, planning and subagents — and open-sourced the second half under MIT. You can build and ship commercial products on it with no license strings, unlike proprietary Claude Code or Codex.
Everything is a plugin — swap the model, the tools, even the UI
Built on the Cordis kernel, every capability — models, tools, skills, sandboxes, storage, scheduling and the UI itself — is a hot-swappable plugin configured without touching core code. In practice: point it at DeepSeek V4, a local model, or another API, and recompose the agent loop around your own workflow.
Four modes, from a two-tool benchmark loop to a self-editing Creator
Standard ships the full kit (files, shell, search, skills, planning, subagents); Code adds model-generated TypeScript for multi-step orchestration; Minimal is a bare bash + str_replace_editor loop for clean benchmarking; Creator opens live runtime inspection so you can prototype plugins while it runs.
Run it tonight: one command, no build step
`npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web` boots a local web UI at 127.0.0.1:3080 — no build required. It's a v0.1 developer preview, so expect breaking changes, but it's already past 85k GitHub stars, which means the plugin ecosystem is going to move fast.