Projects manager

A DeepSeek Harness plugin that tracks how much each project is actually moving, scores stalls against each project's own working pace, and reminds you before work quietly stops.

It sits on top of @malipetek/dsh-projects-panel, which answers "what projects do I have?". This one answers "which of them am I losing?". The two are independent: nothing in the Projects panel changes, and this plugin keeps its own index.

• Momentum page. A ranked list of what is cooling or stalling, why, and the controls to change it.
• App-wide reminder. A dismissible banner over the whole frame, so a stall is visible without opening a panel.
• Scheduled review. A cron task runs the model as your projects manager on weekday mornings; it reads a briefing and writes the nudge.
• Direct commands. Snooze, set a pace, or record a next action from the panel or as /projects … — no model turn, no conversation entry.

What makes the metadata "smarter"

A directory listing can only tell you when files were touched. That is a poor proxy for work: a build, a git checkout, or a sync moves mtimes without anyone working on the project. This plugin reads three independent signals.

1. DSH work history — the one that matters most

DSH already knows when you genuinely worked on a project, because it recorded it. The Host half reads:

Source	What it yields
~/.dsh/storages/workspace.json	Workspace path → Session ids
~/.dsh/storages/session_projcache/sessions/*.json	Each Session's cwd, turn count, LLM time, and lastPromptAt

lastPromptAt is the last time a human actually typed something into a Session whose working directory was that project. That is a far better "last worked on" signal than any file timestamp, and it is available for no other editor.

It also distinguishes opened and abandoned from never started: a project with Sessions but zero turns becomes never-started — you opened it and never asked for anything.

2. Git velocity and drift

Two read-only git invocations per repository:

• git status --porcelain --branch → branch, ahead/behind, modified and untracked counts.
• git log --since=180.days --format=%ct → commit cadence, used both for velocity and to learn the project's own pace.

Velocity is a change: commits in the last 14 days against the 14 before. Drift is uncommitted work accumulating without landing.

3. Stated intent

Some things are only knowable from you. Per project you can record a next action, an expected pace in days, a snooze, or an ignore. This is host-owned state at ~/.dsh/projects-manager/intent.json, so the briefing and the cron review see it too.

How a stall is scored

A global "90 days untouched" threshold is useless across 143 projects that range from daily work to abandoned 2021 experiments. Instead each project is compared against its own baseline.

The baseline is learned from the gaps between that project's distinct activity days (commits and DSH prompts), taken at the 75th percentile — so "unusual for me" means genuinely unusual, not merely below median — and floored at 3 days so an ordinary weekend does not read as decline. A repository that normally commits daily and has now been quiet for five days is flagged; a repository that normally moves fortnightly is not.

State	Meaning
never-started	Opened in DSH, never prompted, nothing committed
stalling	Quiet for longer than 2× its own pace
cooling	Quiet for longer than its own pace
active	Within its own pace
dormant	Quiet for more than 5× its own pace
unstarted	No commits in 180 days and no DSH history
ignored	You asked not to be told again

Risk blends three factors over that baseline: how long the project has been quiet (55%), how far its commit rate has fallen (30%), and how much uncommitted work is piling up (15%). Only never-started, stalling and cooling raise a reminder, and unstarted projects stay silent — otherwise 121 abandoned folders would bury the eight that matter.

The scheduled review

The cron trigger is DSH's own Schedule subsystem rather than a timer in this plugin, so it survives restarts, persists its tasks, and can restore a cold Session to run the turn. It is delivered by the optional bundle @deepseek-ai/dsh-experimental-schedule-bundle, which is enabled in the desktop profile.

The default task is 0 9 * * 1-5 in your local zone, titled Projects review. Each run delivers this instruction into its originating Session:

Act as my projects manager. Read ~/.dsh/projects-manager/manager-brief.md …

The judgement lives in the briefing file rather than in the prompt, so you can read exactly what the model will see.

Set it up once from the panel's Set up weekday review button, by /projects cron <expression>, or by asking the agent to schedule it. Manage it afterwards on the Automation tasks page that enabling the bundle adds to the sidebar.

Commands

/projects … runs directly against the Host — no model message is created and nothing enters the conversation. The panel calls the same commands through remote.commands.execute.

Command	Effect
/projects	Summary of what needs attention
/projects scan	Rescan the folder now
/projects list [state]	List projects, optionally filtered by state
/projects snooze <name> [days]	Hide until then (default 14)
/projects cadence <name> <days>	Set the expected pace
/projects next <name> <text>	Record the next action
/projects resume <name>	Clear snooze and ignore
/projects ignore <name>	Stop reporting a project
/projects cron [expression]	Create or replace the review reminder
/projects remind	Run the review in this Session now

A project may be named by any unambiguous prefix. An ambiguous name is refused with the candidates rather than guessed at.

Model-facing tool

One tool, projects_manager, registered on the Host context and visible to root agents, with actions brief, list, intent, schedule and rescan.

It is registered by handing the tool registry a definition directly — the registry accepts a JSON Schema for parameters, so this plugin imports no DeepSeek Harness package at all and cannot fail to register on module resolution. A single schema keeps the per-request token cost to one tool.

Files it writes

Everything lands in /Users/malipetek/.dsh/projects-manager/:

File	Purpose
index.jsonl	One record per project; read by the Client half
manager-brief.md	The model-readable briefing the cron review reads
intent.json	Your stated next actions, paces, snoozes and ignores
cache.json	Last scan summary: duration, state counts, attention list
doctor.json	Wiring report: whether the tool registered and Schedule is mounted

Nothing is ever written into the projects folder.

Configuration

Constants live at the top of each half and some are mirrored:

Constant	File	Value
PROJECTS_ROOT	index.js	/Users/malipetek/Documents/Documents/Projects
STATE_DIR	index.js	/Users/malipetek/.dsh/projects-manager
INDEX_PATH	client.js	same absolute literal — change both together
RESCAN_INTERVAL_MS	index.js	300000 (5 min)
HISTORY_DAYS	index.js	180
LEARNED_MIN_CADENCE_DAYS	index.js	3
DEFAULT_CRON	index.js	0 9 * * 1-5
BANNER_HOLD_MS	client.js	25000

STATE_DIR is a literal rather than DSH_HOME-derived because the Client half cannot read the Host environment. DSH_PROJECTS_MANAGER_DIR overrides it for the local smoke tests only; the running app never sets it and client.js ignores it.

Snoozes, pace and next actions are host-owned so the scheduled review sees them. The reminder banner's dismissal is browser-local.

Install

"/Applications/DeepSeek Harness.app/Contents/Resources/runtime/cli/bin/dsh" \
  plugin --profile desktop add \
  /Users/malipetek/Documents/deepseek-harness/default-workspace/dsh-projects-manager

Enable the Schedule bundle by listing @deepseek-ai/dsh-experimental-schedule-bundle in the profile's dsh.profile.bundles.

Enabling a bundle is picked up live, but a change to either JavaScript half needs an app restart: the profile watches configuration, and module registrations are not reloaded. Confirm wiring afterwards by reading doctor.json.

Verifying

Two local suites run without the app and are excluded from the published files list:

node dev-smoke.mjs          # collectors, scoring, briefing, commands, tool
node dev-client-smoke.mjs   # renders the page and the banner against a mock React

dev-smoke.mjs writes its output to .smoke-state/ by default via DSH_PROJECTS_MANAGER_DIR, so it never touches real state. Pass --reset to clear the test intent store.

Limitations

• A restart is required after changing either half. Configuration changes apply live; module changes do not.
• The learned pace needs at least three distinct activity days; below that it falls back to 14 days and reports cadenceSource: "default".
• git log reads 180 days, so a project quiet for longer looks unstarted rather than dormant.
• Drift counting treats a vendored or generated directory inside a repository as uncommitted work, which can dominate the score.
• The folder watch is non-recursive and activity inside a project fires no event, so a project's date refreshes on the 5-minute interval at the latest.
• Panel and banner copy is plain English rather than routed through the Client locale service, so it does not switch language.
• /projects remind needs @deepseek-ai/dsh-llm to build the follow-up message; if that import ever fails the command reports the briefing path instead of starting a turn.