deepseek-harness vs maka
DeepSeek's open agent harness (`dsh`): everything is a plugin, on the Cordis composability runtime, with a local web UI one npx away. Developer preview, MIT, moving fast. — versus — Apache-incubating agent workspace where the append-only run log IS the runtime: desktop, TUI, CLI and Eval are thin clients of one host, and every harness benchmark ships with per-task records.
Two open agent harnesses with desktop and CLI surfaces and a plugin story. DeepSeek's dsh bets on composability (everything is a plugin); Maka bets on the log and on measured, verifier-checked task completion.
| deepseek-harness | maka | |
|---|---|---|
| Stars | 210k | 4.8k |
| Forks | 25k | 453 |
| Language | TypeScript | TypeScript |
| License | MIT | Apache-2.0 |
| Last activity | 2 days ago | today |
| Topics | agents, orchestration | coding, agents |
| Curated connections | 6 | 4 |
deepseek-harness — the curator's take
Worth watching because of who ships it and how it's built: a frontier lab's own harness, structured so that every capability — models, tools, memory, UI — is a Cordis plugin rather than a hardcoded loop, which is why a `dsh-plugin` ecosystem appeared around it almost immediately. `npx @deepseek-ai/dsh web` gets you a working UI on port 3080 with nothing to configure. Do not build on it yet without accepting the terms the README states outright: developer preview, iterating rapidly, compatibility-breaking changes expected. The star count reflects the lab's gravity more than the maturity of the code, and the docs are thin next to harnesses that have been in production a year.
maka — the curator's take
Pick Maka if you want a coding-agent harness that treats measurement as the product: every model message, tool call, permission and termination is a RuntimeEvent; the UI, the next prompt and crash recovery are projections of that log; and the project publishes per-task results against other harnesses on the same model with the official verifier. Sessions stay local, you bring the model (API, local, or a gateway). NOT a release yet — no ASF release exists, nightlies are unsigned previews — and NOT the lightest: the discipline is the point. If you want a 100-line agent to read, that's elsewhere on the map.