dsh-claude-cli

Use the Claude Code CLI you already have installed as a DeepSeek Harness LLM provider.

No API key. The plugin runs claude as a subprocess and streams its output back through the harness's LLM seam, so requests authenticate as whatever claude is already logged in as — a login you should check your plan's usage terms against before automating.

The harness stays the agent. The CLI's own agent loop, tools, settings, memory files, and MCP servers are all switched off; what is left is the model call, driven by the harness's system prompt, history, and tools.

Install

Requires a working claude on PATH (Claude Code), Node ^22.19 || >=24, and a harness with @deepseek-ai/dsh-llm.

Install it into the profile you actually run, pointing at your checkout of this repository. The package declares dsh.bundle, so it joins that profile's layer stack and the anthropic-claude-cli route is composed on every start:

dsh plugin --profile web add ../dsh-claude-cli

A path relative to where you run the command is fine here. This plugin is not on npm, so the directory is the only way to install it today.

Restart the harness afterwards — a profile's layer stack is read at startup, so a running server keeps the composition it booted with. The models then appear under Claude Code CLI in the model picker.

Invoking dsh

The commands here assume dsh resolves. How you reach it depends on how the harness is installed:

Harness install	Command
Global	dsh …
Source checkout	pnpm dsh …
Neither	npx @deepseek-ai/dsh …

Use the scoped name with npx. Unscoped dsh on npm is an unrelated JavaScript shell, last published in 2022.

That said, the third row is the odd one: this is a plugin for a harness, so a profile to install it into has to exist already. If you have never run dsh, install the harness first rather than reaching for npx.

cordis.yml is a standalone --patch overlay for trying the plugin in one run, or for a profile you would rather not modify. Replace the placeholder path in it with this directory's absolute path — plugin paths in a patch must be absolute, because a patch contributes configuration without changing the directory the loader resolves module paths from.

dsh --profile headless --patch /absolute/path/to/dsh-claude-cli/cordis.yml "your task"

Unlike the bundle layer, that overlay also repoints agent-default-model at anthropic-claude-cli, so the one-shot run uses it without a model picker.

How tool calls work

The CLI has no "here are some tools, hand their calls back to me" mode, so the plugin declares the harness's tools to it as an MCP server (bridge.mjs). The model then emits real tool_use blocks with provider-validated arguments, which the plugin translates into harness tool-call chunks.

The bridge never executes anything. The harness owns tool execution. The plugin ends the request the moment the model's message ends, so the CLI process is gone before it could dispatch a call of its own.

harness request ──▶ claude --print ──▶ model
                         │                │
                    bridge.mjs ◀──────────┘  (tool schemas only)
                         │
harness chunks ◀─────────┘  tool_use → tool-call → the harness runs the tool

Configuration

Field	Default	Meaning
providers	['anthropic-claude-cli']	Provider routes this adapter serves.
executable	'claude'	Path or command name of the CLI.
cwd	harness cwd	Working directory for the CLI process.
streamIdleTimeoutMs	300000	Maximum gap between CLI output lines before the request fails as TIMEOUT.
unsupportedFields	'error'	error rejects request fields the CLI cannot honor; ignore drops them.
defaultEffort	—	low | medium | high | xhigh | max, used when a request selects none.
extraArgs	[]	Extra arguments for CLI flags this plugin does not model.

extraArgs is passed before the plugin's own flags, and an entry naming one of them is rejected when the plugin loads. Both matter: the CLI keeps the last occurrence of a repeated flag, so appended arguments would otherwise win. A single --tools default was enough to restore the CLI's full tool set — Bash and Edit included — inside the harness's working directory. Use extraArgs for flags the plugin leaves alone, such as --betas.

Models are whatever the CLI accepts: the aliases fable, opus, sonnet, haiku, or a full id such as claude-sonnet-5. The catalog is advisory — an unlisted id is passed to --model unchanged.

Limits

These follow from driving a CLI rather than an HTTP API, and are worth knowing before you switch a long session over to it.

• No prompt caching between turns. The harness is the source of truth for history — it compacts, edits, and replays messages the CLI never sees — so each request renders the harness history into one fresh turn. The model's view always equals the harness log, at the cost of re-reading the conversation every turn. Expect this to matter on long sessions and to count against your Claude usage limits.
• temperature, maxTokens, and stop cannot be honored. The CLI exposes no flag for any of them. They are reported as UNSUPPORTED by default rather than dropped silently; set unsupportedFields: ignore if your agent preset sets them for every route.
• Images are not sent. An image block renders as a visible placeholder in the transcript.
• Prior reasoning is not replayed. The provider discards unsigned thinking from history, so replaying it as text would only spend context.
• No app-attribution header. The harness's attributionHeaders() cannot reach requests the CLI makes on its own behalf.
• Rate limits are the account's. A subscription login is shared with your interactive Claude Code sessions. See Usage terms.

Usage terms

Nothing here bypasses authentication. Requests run through the official CLI, as whatever claude is already logged in as, using the same documented --print mode Claude Code ships for non-interactive use.

What this plugin adds is different in kind: it makes a subscription login the model backend for another agent framework. Anthropic's Consumer Terms reserve programmatic access for API keys, saying you may not reach the services "through automated or non-human means, whether through a bot, script, or otherwise". Whether driving the CLI this way falls inside that sentence is Anthropic's call to make, not this README's.

Treat your own plan's terms and the Usage Policy as the authority over anything written here. In particular:

• Prefer an API key and an HTTP provider for unattended, high-volume, or production traffic. This plugin suits work you would otherwise have run by hand in Claude Code.
• Reselling access, serving other people's requests, and evaluating the models to build a competing product are each separately prohibited, whichever credential you use.

Development

npm test          # unit tests, no CLI or tokens needed
npm run test:e2e  # real CLI, spends real tokens
npm run typecheck
npm run build     # emit lib/ so the plugin loads under a released dsh

src/ is what a source launch (pnpm dsh, which runs through tsx) loads; lib/ is what a released dsh running plain Node loads. npm run build emits the second from the first, and prepare runs it on install.

The e2e suite self-skips when claude is not installed. It covers text streaming with usage ordering, a native tool call with valid JSON arguments, caller abort, and unsupported-field rejection.

Module	Responsibility
src/index.ts	Plugin entry: config schema, adapter registration.
src/adapter.ts	LlmAdapter implementation, invocation assembly, model metadata.
src/cli.ts	Process lifecycle: line framing, idle watchdog, abort, teardown.
src/protocol.ts	The CLI's stream-json vocabulary, as parsed at the process boundary.
src/translate.ts	Wire events → harness StreamChunk protocol.
src/render.ts	Harness history → one CLI user turn.
src/tools.ts	Tool schemas → MCP bridge spec, and tool names back.
src/models.ts	Advisory model catalog and reasoning efforts.
src/failure.ts	CLI failures → provider-neutral LlmFailure codes.
bridge.mjs	The stdio MCP server the CLI launches.

License

MIT