Cordis

T1 — the project's own repository and docs, read directly. The plugin meta-framework underneath DeepSeek Harness, described by its own README as "a Meta-Framework of Spatiotemporal Composability" and by the accompanying paper repo, A Programming Paradigm for Spatiotemporal Composability. MIT, TypeScript, ~1.3k stars.

The dating matters. Cordis was created in May 2022 — four years before the harness that made it visible, and with no connection to agents at the time. Its documentation link now points at DeepSeek's own docs site (deepseek-harness.github.io/.../cordis-primer), so the harness has become the framework's front door. It carries the same warning dsh does: the API is not stable and may change without notice.

What it provides

Plugins contribute services, typed events, and reversible effects to a shared context (ctx). Two properties do the work in dsh:

• No privileged core. Extension means mounting a plugin beside the others rather than patching a centre, which is what lets dsh claim the agent loop, tool registry, model adapter and session log are each replaceable from configuration.
• Registrations are effects that unwind. When a plugin unloads, what it registered is withdrawn. That is the "temporal" half of the composability claim, and it is what makes hot-swapping a row in a running tree a coherent operation instead of a leak.

Services are addressed by ctx key — dsh's own table reads ctx.sessions, ctx.tools, ctx.agents, ctx.agentLoop, ctx.llm, ctx.skills, ctx.jobs, ctx.fs — and a scope primitive layers registrations per agent, so a preset's plugins are visible to that preset and not globally.

Why it is filed here

This spoke keeps finding that the interesting variation lives in the harness rather than the model, and mostly finds harnesses that were designed as harnesses. Cordis is the other case: a general-purpose composition framework, built for something else, adopted wholesale as an agent substrate. The agent-specific vocabulary — turns, steps, tool pipelines, session logs — is layered on top as plugins, not baked into the framework.

Whether that generality pays is unmeasured, and the honest reading today is that it costs a concept budget: understanding dsh's architecture doc requires understanding Cordis first, which the doc says outright in its opening line.

Related

deepseek-harness · agent-middleware · agent-framework · agentic-coding-harness · agent-scope-isolation