dsh-effort-memory

An out-of-tree DeepSeek Harness (DSH) plugin that remembers the reasoning effort last actually in effect for each (provider, model) route and restores it when a session switches back to that model.

Why

The composer's model seat renders the effort from the durable modelSelection projection. Picking a different model sends that model's own defaultEffort (dsh-client-ui-model-selection/lib/client.js:427,883), and the host resolver materializes the adapter default when a caller omits an effort (dsh-llm/lib/index.js:2116-2130). So a model switch always lands on the new model's default, and the level chosen on the model being left is not restored on return.

This plugin closes that gap by re-issuing exactly one selection through the same public command interface the GUI calls — it appends no session events itself, registers no service, and writes no settings.

Behavior

1. The memory key is (provider, model); the value is the effort id that was last in effect on that route.
2. On a route change A -> B, the plugin remembers A's effort, then:
   • if B has a remembered effort and B currently advertises it, it re-issues one selection through ctx.sessionController.selectModel(...), so the session's durable selection becomes { B, that effort };
   • otherwise it does nothing and B keeps its own default. This is deliberate: a first visit to a never-used model lands on that model's default.
3. A route change is recognized across a restart too: each session's pre-switch route is seeded from the durable modelSelection projection at session/created — attach time, while that projection still reflects the stored log alone. Reading the seed from inside the event handler would be vacuous: stateOf materializes at the session's current cursor, which already includes the event being handled, so the seed would always equal the event itself.
4. A target model that declares no reasoning capability (resolved reasoning missing, or reasoningEfforts: false in settings) gets no reasoningEffort and no error.
5. A remembered effort the target no longer advertises (for example rewritten by dsh-custom-reasoning-effort) falls back to the model's default silently, with no retry.
6. Effort-only changes on the model already selected are never touched.

Design constraints

• Host half only. No client.js, no slot, no React, no UI.
• One lever. ctx.sessionController.selectModel — the same public command interface the GUI calls. The plugin never appends session events itself and never rewrites in-memory selection state.
• Capability first. ctx.llm.resolveModelInfo(provider, model) is consulted before any re-issue, because selectModel throws UNSUPPORTED_REASONING_EFFORT for a level the target does not advertise.
• Loop-safe. Only a route change can trigger a re-issue, only when the event's effort differs from the remembered one, and the re-issue keeps the same route — so the event it produces cannot re-enter the rule as a change.
• Replay-safe. Constructor seeds (replay, fork, resume) never publish on the session/event firehose; a seq < session.firstLiveSeq guard is kept as belt-and-braces. The pre-switch route of a session not yet seen in this process comes from the attach-time seed above, never from the projection inside an event handler.
• No services, no settings, no retries. Any failure is logged and skipped; nothing is ever surfaced to the user.
• Zero runtime dependencies. defineDomain/domainTable are identity wrappers and the runtime calls only valueSchema.parse(raw), so the domain spec is declared inline; a link: install does not install a linked package's own dependencies, so a bare import of zod or @deepseek-ai/dsh-storage-domain would not resolve.

Persistence

• Domain effort_memory, table efforts, key JSON.stringify([provider, model]), record { reasoningEffort }.
• The domain name must match UNIT_NAME_RE = /^[a-z][a-z0-9_]*$/, which forbids the hyphen — hence the domain is effort_memory while the package, the bundle patch row id, and the exported plugin name all stay effort-memory.
• With the base storage stack mounted, the single-layout document lands at $DSH_HOME/storages/effort_memory.json and survives restarts.
• Without ctx.storageDomain, memory degrades to a process-local Map (a warning is logged at apply time) and is lost on restart.

Install

From a checkout, by path:

dsh plugin --profile <name> add link:<absolute path to this repository>

Directly from GitHub:

dsh plugin --profile <name> add github:cup113/dsh-effort-memory

dsh plugin forwards to pnpm in the profile directory and then reconciles dsh.profile.bundles: a dependency resolving to a package that declares dsh.bundle joins the layer stack automatically. A new bundle row and its Node ESM module are both loaded at boot, so restart dsh after installing or after editing index.js.

Layout

Path	Role
index.js	Host half: event listener, service calls, storage memory (apply, inject, name)
decide.js	Pure rules: route keys, effort normalization, the decision table
cordis.patch.yml	The one bundle row (id: effort-memory, name: dsh-effort-memory)
test/	Test suites: pure layer, packaging parity, and an integration test
_verify/	Harness used against a live DSH: a dynamic host probe, a multi-frame session-log extractor, a mutation check

Only the root files listed in files are the bundle; test/ and _verify/ are inert to the Loader.

Tests

node test/all.mjs

Twenty-two assertions: the pure decision table, packaging parity (bundle row id, package name, storage-domain name), and an integration suite that drives the real apply() against a fake Cordis context — listener shape, event ordering, the re-issue loop breaker, replay-seed rejection, the restart seed, and the storage-less fallback. CI runs the same entry on Node 20 and 22.

node --test is deliberately not used: it runs each file in a child process with piped stdio, which a confined sandbox refuses.

_verify/mutation-check.mjs proves the decision assertions are not vacuous: with the restore branch removed from decide.js, the canonical assertion flips.

Known limitations

1. One settings write per switch is performed by the public selectModel path itself (agentDefaultModel.saveSelection → settings.replace('agent-default-model', …)). This plugin adds no settings namespace and no settings write of its own.
2. Memory is global per (provider, model) — shared by every session and workspace, as specified.
3. The plugin acts on every live session whose route changes, subagent sessions included. Restricting to root sessions would require an extra agents dependency.
4. Without sessionProjections there is no attach-time seed, so a session's first switch after a restart only establishes a baseline and is not restored; every later switch in the same process is.
5. A stale remembered level is kept in the domain (harmless): if a model's effort table later regains that level, it will be restored again.
6. Single-process visibility only; domain/changed does not cross processes.

License

MIT © 2026 Jason Li