dsh-sidebar-enhance: Letting AI Drive the DeepSeek Harness Sidebar

What Does It Do?

It is a DSH plugin for DeepSeek Harness that uses official DSH APIs to let the AI drive the client sidebar directly. It solves the annoyance of having to click through to see what the agent produced: after writing a file, starting a service, or building a page, the sidebar can open on its own and put the result in front of you. It does not create a new sidebar, copy any UI, or touch the model — it only drives the official API to expand the sidebar and turns the sidebar browser into something the agent can operate. Maintained by 2123043818 under the MIT license, it runs purely locally with no external service dependency and was last updated in 2026-10.

Core Features

• Result reveal: registers a sidebar_reveal tool with file, changes, files, terminal, and browser modes, able to open a specific file, the current round's diff, the workspace file tree, the terminal, or a given URL.
• Browser bridge: provides browser_navigate, browser_read, browser_find, and browser_act tools so the AI can read a page's title and body, locate elements by CSS selector or visible text, and click, type, select, press keys, scroll, or wait.
• In-place navigation: when a tab already exists, navigation happens in place instead of spawning a pile of new tabs, so the page you are viewing is not disturbed.
• Three-button authorization: reading and interacting trigger an interception page offering "allow this access" (no prompts for 10 minutes in this session), "always allow (this session)", or "deny"; a global browserPolicy setting (ask / allow) also exists.
• Safe defaults: all HTTP routes accept only loopback requests, authorization never outlives the process and expires on restart, and the AI can only operate the single page you already opened in the sidebar.
• Diagnostic logging: logs are written to sidebar-enhance.log and can be read in the plugin panel's diagnostic log view, which also shows whether the browser bridge is online and when it last polled.

How to Use This Plugin?

After enabling it in the DSH desktop client, the agent calls the reveal tool as it wraps up a turn and the sidebar opens by itself to present the result; when it needs to look something up or verify a page, it opens the page through the browser bridge and reads the content. Navigation needs no authorization — only reading and interacting trigger the prompt, where you choose the scope you are comfortable with. Desktop 0.2.0-rc2 fully supports both sidebar reveal and the browser bridge; dsh web supports reveal but not the bridge, and a community-built Linux shell has been tested working for reveal. After installing, fully quit the desktop client including the tray and start it again — refreshing the page is not enough. Note the plugin has a browser half and a host half, and the host half loads only once at process start, so refreshing alone yields a "new client + old host" state with no error reported. Handing the browser to the AI means it can read everything on that page, including logged-in admin panels and private information, so authorize only when you are comfortable with the AI seeing the current page.

How to Troubleshoot This Plugin?

If sidebar reveal works but the browser bridge tools error out, check the runtime first: the bridge depends on Electron webview capabilities that the web client and some community shells do not provide, which is an environment limitation rather than a plugin fault. If changes to the host half do not take effect, you likely only refreshed the page instead of restarting the desktop process — fully quit and restart as the official instructions describe. Whether the channel is down can be seen in the plugin panel's diagnostic log view via the "browser bridge: online · last poll Ns ago" line, and the log file also records a protocol version line for each half so you can confirm whether the latest build is loaded.