DeepSeek Harness Session Evidence

Traceability

• Spec ID: deepseek-harness-session-evidence
• Story: #93
• Status: Implemented
• Follow-up status: Implemented (DSH 0.1.1-rc.1 compatibility; known baseline facts privacy defect unresolved)

Intent

Add a narrowly scoped, read-only DeepSeek Harness (dsh) session adapter so Better Harness can analyze durable DSH JSONL evidence after a run. The first slice stops at session discovery, workspace qualification, validation, and normalization into the existing session-analysis contract. It deliberately does not present DSH as a first-class or natively integrated Better Harness host.

This specification freezes the partial boundary approved by the maintainer in Issue #93, including the feature-detection policy approved in the 2026-08-18T13:13:05Z comment. The supported native contract is pinned to upstream commits 99f6f02fecdb7dff40c3fbc9470f5907c29f74ca (dsh-v0.1.0-rc.7) and 141eb6fef83422698aef7a981029e843e8161534 (dsh-v0.1.0-rc.8), both with SESSION_FORMAT_VERSION = 0. Later upstream behavior is not implicitly supported. The additive 0.1.1-rc.1 qualification below is an implemented contract for the pinned optional permission/preset.origin extension; it does not qualify later releases or unrelated 0.1.1 behavior.

Native Contract Evidence

The implementation and its support claims remain bound to these five primary upstream sources at the RC7 commit:

1. Developer-preview status, compatibility warning, and plugin-oriented positioning
2. Base profile composition and the DSH-home sessions route
3. Session header, format version, event vocabulary, correlation fields, and turn outcomes
4. JSONL layout, default Zstandard encoding, packed rows, identity checks, and discovery constraints
5. SQLite's separate persistence and discovery contract

The RC8 requalification and RC8-only extensions are separately bound to their corresponding source owners at the RC8 commit:

6. assistant/message.interrupted and the current session event vocabulary
7. Committed JSONL rows and packed-row expansion
8. Concatenated Zstandard frame scanning and torn-frame boundaries
9. DSH-home precedence and blank-environment handling
10. team/member, team/task, team/message/queued, and team/message/delivered payload contracts
11. Strict team payload schemas and replay relationships
12. Team task dependency-graph constraints

The 0.1.1-rc.1 compatibility follow-up is pinned separately to commit 528c682e061696f5a160f363f236ecbf53cbd006 and these package-owned sources:

13. permission/preset payload declaration and backward-readable optional origin
14. origin replay/refresh semantics for default, explicit, inferred, and origin-less selections
15. The package-owned write paths for all three legal origin values
16. RC.1 core format, header, event envelope, lifecycle, request, assistant usage, and tool-correlation contracts
17. RC.1 known event vocabulary and unknown-event refusal policy
18. RC.1 JSONL header, packed-row expansion, and committed-record scanning
19. RC.1 concatenated Zstandard frame reader
20. RC.1 persisted subagent descriptor contract

Synthetic fixtures may encode only behavior supported by those pinned sources and the approved Issue #93 boundary. A fixture passing is not evidence that a newer DSH build remains compatible. Same-version structural drift must fail closed rather than extending this contract by inference.

DSH 0.1.1-rc.1 Compatibility Follow-up

Status and qualification target

This implemented follow-up remains under Story #93 and targets only the official DSH npm package 0.1.1-rc.1 at tag commit 528c682e061696f5a160f363f236ecbf53cbd006. It is temporally additive to the implemented RC7/RC8 evidence; it does not rewrite that historical qualification or imply support for later DSH releases.

Current failure and upstream contract delta

A real headless DSH 0.1.1-rc.1 coding run completed and persisted a structurally healthy format-0 session, but Better Harness at 996fd3d3045dfe29935fc7948377416712ab2711 rejected it during public discovery with dsh-artifact-rejected and DSH_EVENT_SHAPE_DRIFT. The rejected event was permission/preset, whose package-owned payload changed from the RC8 shape:

{ preset: string }

to the 0.1.1-rc.1 declaration:

{ preset: string, origin?: "default" | "selection" | "inferred" }

origin is optional: its absence keeps logs written before origin tracking readable. When present it is a string in exactly the closed set default, selection, or inferred; null, other JSON types, and arbitrary strings are not declared legal. No additional payload keys are declared by the owner, and the pinned package write paths emit only preset and optional origin. Therefore unrelated extra keys remain outside this adapter's qualified schema even though the upstream package invariant independently checks preset membership rather than acting as a generic exact-key JSON parser.

The field records provenance/intent for permission default refresh: only a still-effective default selection may be refreshed for a confirmed reusable blank session. Explicit selection, inferred, and legacy origin-less records remain pinned. The ordinary effectivePermissionPreset fold still returns only data.preset; origin does not change event identity, sequencing, turn/step membership, tool association, or model transcript membership.

Pinned source-diff audit

The pinned RC8-to-0.1.1-rc.1 source diff changes the permission-presets owner above and a subagent projection implementation. The subagent change migrates projection state/wire schema registration; the persisted subagent/descriptor, its invariant and lifecycle sources are byte-unchanged. The complete production source directories for core session contracts, JSONL/Zstandard persistence, DSH-home resolution, and agent-team events are also byte-unchanged. Consequently the audited format version remains 0, and the HeaderLine, event envelope and contiguous seq semantics, request headers, turn/step/tool lifecycle, lineage and seedLength, assistant usage, known event vocabulary, packed-row expansion, and framed-Zstandard persistence retain their RC8 definitions. This is a scoped comparison of the existing adapter's contract owners, not a claim of universal compatibility with every 0.1.1-rc.1 package or future event payload.

Supported behavior

The implementation extends only the exact permission/preset data validator so that a missing origin and each of the three pinned enum values are accepted. It validates but does not project origin: the field alone creates no fact, analytics dimension, ownership, causality, user-intent inference, or new public output. Invalid types, null, invalid strings, and unrelated unknown keys continue to fail closed with shape drift. No wildcard passthrough or generic extra-property acceptance is permitted.

The resulting compatibility boundary is:

Better Harness dsh-v1 remains a partial sessionAnalysis adapter for format-0 persisted session evidence, qualified against the audited RC7/RC8 baseline plus the pinned DSH 0.1.1-rc.1 permission/preset schema extension.

This is not "latest DSH" or full DSH 0.1.1 support.

Native qualification evidence and diagnostic boundary

The already-completed isolated run used the official npm package 0.1.1-rc.1 at the pinned commit. DSH completed its task and produced 31 complete Zstandard frames, 100 physical storage records, and 546 contiguous logical events: one complete turn, five complete steps, five assistant messages all carrying usage, and seven tool calls with seven matching results. The session was complete, with no framing corruption or unknown event type.

A read-only, in-memory diagnostic removed only the new origin member. All 546 logical events then passed the existing Better Harness decoder and relationship validation. No repository file or upstream artifact was changed. This isolates the observed rejection but does not claim that the full public Better Harness route passed: discovery rejected the real artifact before sessions, events, facts, show, gated show, and selection/reference behavior could all be re-qualified.

Security and privacy boundary

The failed public discovery output did not expose the raw prompt, credential name, private DSH home, or raw session id. That confirms the rejection path only. After implementation, default and content-authorized public paths must be re-qualified without printing or storing real content. Any later regression fixture must be minimal, synthetic, contract-focused, and free of real transcripts, credentials, secrets, and machine-specific paths.

During implementation, an isolated comparison at the pre-origin Better Harness baseline 996fd3d3045dfe29935fc7948377416712ab2711 used a naturally accepted, origin-less RC7/RC8-compatible format-0 fixture and an ephemeral equality-only prompt oracle. It reproduced the direct-user prompt at candidates[0].request.summary in default facts; the baseline and rc.1 branch otherwise produced identical public sessions, events, facts, show, and gated- show results for that fixture. This confirms a pre-existing default-facts defect, not a privacy regression introduced by the optional-origin validator. The defect remains unresolved and outside this compatibility follow-up; this evidence does not claim that default-facts privacy is safe.

Support Boundary

The delivered support claim is:

DSH persisted JSONL session
  -> workspace qualification
  -> supported event normalization
  -> Better Harness session evidence

The Better Harness adapter metadata id is dsh-v1; the only supported native DSH session format is 0. The dsh host is registered only for the sessionAnalysis capability. Raw session.jsonl and, when the running Node.js runtime exposes the required public Zstandard API, concatenated checksummed session.jsonl.zstd are the only physical encodings. SQLite and custom persistence providers remain unavailable.

Support is JSONL-only and partial. Every artifact is read-only. Unavailable, incomplete, malformed, ambiguous, foreign-workspace, and unsupported evidence must remain visible as such or be rejected according to the acceptance scenarios below; it must never be guessed, repaired, rewritten, or promoted to a broader host capability.

Acceptance Scenarios

AC-1: Scope resolution

An explicit --dsh-home value takes precedence over inherited DSH_HOME, which takes precedence over the default ~/.dsh. A blank or whitespace-only inherited DSH_HOME is unset; explicit values retain normal path validation.