echocat-skill-panel: A Skill Usage Audit and Management Panel for DeepSeek Harness

What Does It Do?

Echocat Skill Panel is a DSH plugin for DeepSeek Harness that audits which skills each conversation turn actually used and manages those skills inside the app. It derives skill usage from the session event stream instead of trusting the model to report it, so a forgotten mention still shows up in the counts. It also moves installing, disabling, updating and deleting skills into the app UI, so you no longer edit directories by hand. Maintained by VDERR under the MIT license, it shares one dataset across three surfaces: the bar above the composer, the left-rail icon, and the center panel.

Core Features

• Usage audit: derives the skills used in a turn from session events, separating model-initiated calls, manual /name calls and unused skills, with four counters for turns, skills used, unused and call count.
• In-app skill management: installs from a pasted repository URL, a SKILL.md link, a zip direct link or owner/repo, and also accepts uploaded files or a pasted SKILL.md; same-name installs are backed up before replacement.
• Source tracking and updates: records the URL, branch, subdirectory, commit and a content fingerprint in the skill's own metadata file, marks a card as updatable when the remote has new commits, and replaces it in two clicks with the old version moved to backup first.
• One-click citation: pressing "cite" on a card appends /name to the draft, so pressing enter invokes it as a manual gesture.
• Disable and Chinese display names: each skill has a toggle that moves its directory out of the skills folder DSH watches without deleting files, and a Chinese name stored in the skill's meta.yaml is shown in the panel.
• Adaptive interface: the bar and panel widths derive from the host composer width, always stay narrower than the input and share its center axis, with light and dark themes whose text contrast is checked against WCAG.

How to Use This Plugin?

After enabling it in DSH, a persistent bar appears directly above the composer showing one conclusion line and four counters; clicking it expands the full report in place. To install a skill, paste the author's address into the install entry and the host decides whether to clone or download, parsing branch and subdirectory from the address; the success notice carries the same cite button, so the skill is usable immediately. When a card is marked updatable, two clicks replace it and the old version goes to backup; skills installed by hand can be brought under updates by filling in a source once. Renaming to Chinese, disabling and deleting all happen on the card, and disabling only moves the directory out of the watched folder so it can be re-enabled at any time.

How to Troubleshoot This Plugin?

• A newly installed skill does not take effect: the host half is snapshotted into memory at boot, so DSH Desktop Beta must be restarted after host changes, while client-only changes just need a page refresh.
• Hand edits are lost after an update: updating overwrites files you edited in that skill, and the confirmation text says so explicitly; this is the only scenario where changes are lost.
• A source pinned to a commit is wrongly reported as having a new version: the check runs a single remote reference query without re-downloading content, so a source fixed at one commit is not misreported.
• The host does not allow writes: the plugin switches to read-only automatically and explains why, so fix permissions as described in the official instructions before retrying.