@dennisrongo/dsh-git

A per-workspace source-control tab for the DeepSeek Harness web UI. It adds a Changes tab beside Chat, Trajectory, and Todo that shows everything that differs in the workspace's repository, and lets you stage, commit (with an AI-written message), initialize, and sync — without leaving the session.

What it does

• View changes — staged, unstaged, untracked, and conflicted files, each with a status letter and a click-to-open unified diff.
• Stage / unstage / discard — per file or per section. Discard is the one destructive action and always confirms first.
• AI commit messages — "✦ AI message" sends the diff to the model you already selected for new sessions and writes a Conventional Commits message.
• Commit — with an empty index it commits everything (-a); with a staged set it commits exactly that. Ctrl/Cmd+Enter commits from the box.
• Initialize — a directory that is not a repository shows an Initialize button with an editable initial branch name.
• Sync — Fetch, Pull (fast-forward only), Push / Publish, and a combined pull-then-push, with ahead/behind counts on the buttons.

The layout

The diff sits beside the file list when the tab is wide and below it when it is narrow. The switch is a container query (@container dshgit (min-width: 720px)), not a media query: this is a tab inside a shell whose sidebar and panels resize independently of the viewport, so the width that matters is the tab's own. container-type is declared on .dshgit — the root — because a container query cannot style its own container.

Opening a diff never moves a row. The list's column width is reserved even with no diff open, so the first click can't cut it from full width to a column and reflow every filename under the pointer. Stacked, the diff takes the lower 55% in normal flow rather than floating over the list — shrinking a scrollport does not move the content inside it (scrollTop stays put and the maximum scrollTop rises), whereas an overlay hid the very row you had just clicked whenever the list was scrolled near its end.

While a patch is in flight the pane shows a skeleton shaped like a diff — shimmering meta / hunk / add / del bands at varied widths, sized off the real 18px diff line — instead of a spinner, which blanks a large surface. The shimmer animates background-position over an oversized gradient, never a transform or a box dimension, so it cannot shift layout, and prefers-reduced-motion flattens the bars to a static tone. Loading is a separate flag rather than a sentinel string, so a diff whose text genuinely reads "Loading diff…" can't render as a skeleton. Clicking down a list starts overlapping requests, so each carries a monotonic sequence number and any reply that isn't the newest is discarded — otherwise a slow one settling late paints the wrong file's patch under the right filename.

Icons are inline 16px SVGs on a matching 0 0 16 16 viewBox, in 20px buttons. The size is fixed and not a prop: the shell pairs each icon size with its own viewBox, so 16-unit path data rendered into a 14px box comes out shrunk with thinned strokes. The 20px button box (not 24px) and .dshgit-row's pinned line-height: 20px are what keep file rows at 32px — in a flex row the tallest child sets the height.

Architecture

The plugin ships two halves that never share a process:

File	Half	Role
src/index.ts	host	The dshGit service. Resolves a workspace id to its directory via workspaceRegistry, runs git, and calls llm for messages.
src/git.ts	host	The git engine: execFile wrapper and porcelain parsers.
src/remote.ts	both	Strict zod Typert descriptors — the wire contract.
src/client.tsx	browser	The Changes tab, registered into the conversation.view slot at order: 30.
src/types.ts	both	Shared, dependency-free vocabulary.

The browser never touches a repository: it calls ctx.remote.dshGit.* over the Typert bridge, and the host does the work.

Things that are load-bearing

Several details are easy to "clean up" and thereby break:

• The host half must not be minified, and must target es2021. The Typert gateway discovers a @Remote method's wire fields by reading its parameter names from Function.prototype.toString(); minification renames request and silently breaks the contract. @Remote is also a TC39 standard decorator, which Node cannot yet parse — esbuild only downlevels it when the target predates decorators.
• Every remote codec must be strict. The client's $mount rejects src-json codecs, and a rejected mount means the tab silently never appears.
• provider and model are required on ctx.llm.stream(). Omitting them yields an empty stream that looks like "the model produced no message".
• Git status is parsed from -z output. The default format quotes and escapes paths containing spaces or non-ASCII bytes; -z emits them raw.
• Git is invoked with an argument array, never a shell. Paths, branch names, and commit messages are untrusted text.

Install

// ~/.dsh/profiles/
/package.json
{ "dependencies": { "@dennisrongo/dsh-git": "file:/path/to/dsh-git" } }

# ~/.dsh/profiles/
/cordis.patch.yml
- insert:
    - id: dsh-git
      name: '@dennisrongo/dsh-git'

Then pnpm install in the profile and restart dsh.

Develop

pnpm install
pnpm build        # emits lib/index.js + lib/client.js
pnpm typecheck
pnpm test         # parsers, contract, and real-git operations

The offline suite runs git against throwaway repositories. Four probes drive headless Chrome against the built lib/client.js and need no running harness:

pnpm test:layout     # the diff sits beside the list at 1200px, below it at 560px
pnpm test:stability  # opening a diff moves no row, and never covers the list
pnpm test:skeleton   # the loading placeholder matches the real diff line's rhythm
pnpm test:icons      # icon geometry and the 32px row budget

Three further checks drive a real headless Chrome against a running server:

pnpm test:ui      # the tab registers, mounts, and renders
pnpm test:ai      # the AI button produces a Conventional Commits message
pnpm test:commit  # staging + committing changes real bytes on disk

test:layout and test:stability both slice the CSS out of the built bundle, which is also why a backtick must never appear in the stylesheet's comments: it is a template literal, so a stray one closes it early and silently truncates every rule after it.