Here is what happened. On the evening of August 14, I was scrolling on my phone when I saw DeepSeek had shipped something new called Harness. Normally I am immune to “framework” releases — everybody ships a framework these days, each name more intimidating than the last. But I clicked in, and one slogan jumped out at me: Everything is a Plugin. I thought about it for a second. There is something to that phrase. I installed it that same night. ...
Last week, right after the official release of DeepSeek V4 Pro, they threw out something else called DeepSeek Harness. Its GitHub stars shot to 37,000 in three days. My first reaction was: DeepSeek is finally shipping its own Agent? I installed the developer preview immediately. Once it was installed, I was lost — this was nothing like what I imagined an Agent to be. There is no chat box where you say “write me a crawler.” Instead there is an empty workspace and a long list of plugins I could not make sense of. For a moment I suspected I had installed the wrong thing. ...