dsh-honcho: Persistent Cross-Session Memory for DeepSeek Harness

What Does It Do?

Honcho is a DSH plugin for DeepSeek Harness, maintained by plastic-labs under the MIT license, that brings Honcho's persistent memory into the harness. DSH forgets everything when a session ends, and this plugin supplies memory that does not: what you are building, how you like to work, and what you decided last week and why. It reads the same Honcho configuration file as the other Honcho integrations, so there is one place to configure all of them, and pointing two of them at the same workspace gives them one shared memory.

Core Features

• Injects what Honcho knows at session start: your profile, a summary of this project's sessions so far, and conclusions relevant to your latest request, shaped to a character budget and refreshed as you work.
• Captures every turn in the background: user and assistant messages are uploaded debounced and flushed at turn boundaries, before compaction, and on shutdown, with secrets redacted first.
• Exposes three model tools: honcho_search for looking something up across raw messages and derived conclusions, honcho_chat for questions of judgment, and honcho_remember for saving durable facts, preferences, or decisions.
• Configurable session strategy: sessions can be split per directory, given a peer prefix, or pinned to a fixed session name for a specific repository path.
• Fine-grained injection and capture controls: separate menus for session-start and per-turn injection, plus search depth, conclusion limits, context token budget, and whether tool-use summaries are saved.

How to Use This Plugin?

After enabling it in DSH, prepare an API key on the Honcho side and put it together with your identity name into the Honcho configuration file; the key in the environment also works on its own, and the file is only needed to change defaults. Then simply start a session: the plugin injects memory at session start and captures messages in the background, with no manual trigger required. Ask the model to call honcho_search when you need to look something up, honcho_chat for judgment-style answers, and honcho_remember to keep something long term. Typing /honcho shows status and a link to the session in the Honcho dashboard. Behavioral settings live under the dsh host block of the configuration file, covering injection components, session strategy, and capture frequency.

How to Troubleshoot This Plugin?

If memory is not injected or uploaded as expected, first check whether the global kill switch in the configuration file has disabled the dsh host block, and whether workspace and aiPeer point at the intended space. If search results are too few or too noisy, adjust the retrieval count, maximum distance, and conclusion limits, then watch how the injected content changes. If uploads contain information that should not leave your machine, review the noise patterns and add your own rules, since the built-in secret patterns are applied first. If sessions are split too finely, switch to per-directory sessions or pin a session name to a repository path.