DeepSeek Harness Skills Explained + Best Plugins
How DeepSeek Harness (dsh) skills actually work — the provider registry and dsh-tool-skill — plus the best skill-pack plugins by GitHub stars, as of 2026.
DeepSeek Harness (dsh) implements skills as a provider-registry pattern, not a single fixed folder format: multiple skill sources merge together, and one consumer plugin exposes them to the model as a tool. On top of that mechanism, the community has published skill packs for reverse engineering, design systems, and shareable workflows. By stars, the top pick is skills by creght-dev. Full list, mechanism details, and install commands below.
How skills actually work in dsh
Before the list, it's worth being precise about the mechanism, because "skill" means something specific in dsh rather than being an informal term for "capability." Skills live behind a provider registry: ctx.skills merges multiple skill sources — the local filesystem provider (dsh-skill-filesystem), a packaged built-in provider (dsh-skill-badge), and any others a plugin registers — into one catalog. When two providers offer a skill with the same name, priority is resolved by tier, then provider order, then local order.
The actual model-facing side is a separate plugin, dsh-tool-skill, which exposes a single skill tool. When the model calls it, the skill's content gets injected into context at that point — skills aren't loaded up front into every prompt, they're pulled in on demand.
One thing worth flagging explicitly, because it comes up in the community: whether dsh's skill format is directly compatible with Claude Code's SKILL.md directory convention is not confirmed by the official docs. dsh's SkillProvider.list()/get() interface is its own design, and a GitHub Discussion on this exact question didn't produce an official statement either way. If a plugin claims Claude Code skill compatibility, treat that as the plugin author's own compatibility layer, not a dsh guarantee.
The list
This ranking uses only the human-reviewed awesome-dsh-plugin collection (source=awesome). Skills is one of the smaller categories in the catalog — 32 plugins as of August 2026 including auto-discovered ones — and the curated set below is exactly the 7 that made the human-reviewed list. Stars are a snapshot as of August 2026.
| # | Plugin | Stars | What it does |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | skills | 7 | Website-building skills for the Creght platform |
| 2 | dsh-reverse-skill | 4 | 85-file reverse engineering / pentesting skill pack |
| 3 | dsh-design-skills | 4 | 10-style design-aesthetics skill pack |
| 4 | dsh-skill-manager-ytxue | 3 | Skill pool manager UI in Settings |
| 5 | hermes-dsh-collab | 3 | Hooks dsh into a Hermes multi-agent pipeline |
1. skills (creght-dev) — 7 stars
Category: Skills · Repo: creght-dev/skills
The top-starred entry, though narrower in scope than the name suggests: it's a skill pack purpose-built for building websites on the Creght platform, covering CLI pull/push sync, page and component conventions, CMS, forms, auth, SEO, publishing, and version rollback. Useful specifically if you're on that platform; a good reference otherwise for how a full-stack platform-specific skill pack is structured.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:creght-dev/skills
2. dsh-reverse-skill — 4 stars
Category: Skills · Repo: dhicoc/dsh-reverse-skill
A complete reverse-skill pack — 85 SKILL.md files — packaged as a Cordis plugin, functioning as a skill router for reverse engineering, authorized penetration testing, and security research. The scale here (85 individual skill files in one pack) is a useful data point for what a mature skill pack looks like once it's grown past a handful of one-off skills.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:dhicoc/dsh-reverse-skill
3. dsh-design-skills — 4 stars
Category: Skills · Repo: zhaiyateng/dsh-design-skills
A design-aesthetics skill pack covering 10 distinct styles — dark SaaS, minimal white, neumorphism, brutalism, glassmorphism, Japanese minimal, bento grid, cyberpunk, vaporwave, and art deco — each with runnable landing-page demos, design tokens, component rules, forbidden lists, and per-style acceptance checklists. If you're tired of every agent-generated UI looking the same, this is a concrete attempt at giving the model actual style discipline rather than a vague adjective in the prompt.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:zhaiyateng/dsh-design-skills
4. dsh-skill-manager-ytxue — 3 stars
Category: Skills · Repo: ytxue/dsh-skill-manager-ytxue
Not a skill pack itself, but tooling for managing the ones you already have: a skill pool manager in the Settings sidebar with enable/disable toggles, folder batch import with rename-conflict prompts, a state-driven one-click DSH-spec check-and-autofix, and system/project scope labels. Once you're running more than a couple of skill packs from different sources, this is the plugin that keeps them from turning into an unmanaged pile.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:ytxue/dsh-skill-manager-ytxue
5. hermes-dsh-collab — 3 stars
Category: Skills · Repo: cavan-ou/hermes-dsh-collab
Distributed as a SKILL.md pack (bundle-installable), this hooks dsh into a "Hermes" multi-agent pipeline: a dispatch-spec template, model-tier routing, orchestrator-run quality gates, and a git single-writer rule. A useful example of skills being used not just to teach the model a task, but to encode team-level process constraints directly into what the agent can and can't do.
dsh plugin --profile web add github:cavan-ou/hermes-dsh-collab
Rounding out the curated set: dsh-rigorquant (1 star, a preset plus skill pack for unattended multi-agent research in computational economics/finance, with a four-part pre-implementation check battery) and dsh-skill-pack (0 stars, 11 shareable workflow skills — handoff, triage, to-spec, to-tickets, and others — published to npm as @jeremy9682/dsh-skill-pack). Browse the full set on the Skills category page.
FAQ
Does dsh have any official skills built in?
Yes, at least one: dsh-skill-badge is an official packaged provider mentioned in the source tree, though the docs don't enumerate a full list of what ships by default. The plugins on this list are all community-published skill packs layered on top.
Can I use my existing Claude Code SKILL.md files with dsh?
Not confirmed as directly compatible. dsh defines its own SkillProvider interface, and community Discussion threads on this exact question haven't produced an official "yes, drop the folder in" answer. If direct reuse matters to you, check a specific plugin's README for an explicit compatibility claim rather than assuming it from the shared .md file convention.
How is a skill different from a tool in dsh?
A tool (ctx.tools.register()) is something the model calls to take an action and get a result back. A skill is content — instructions, conventions, reference material — that gets injected into context when the model invokes the skill tool. The skill mechanism is really "a tool for retrieving prompt content on demand," not a separate execution capability.
Do skill packs slow down every session, even when unused?
Not by default in terms of context — skills are pulled in on demand via the skill tool rather than loaded into every prompt up front. But the skill catalog itself (names and descriptions the model needs to decide what to call) does add some fixed context cost as you install more packs; see dsh-context-doctor in Best DeepSeek Harness Plugins for Developers if you want to measure that directly.
Next steps
For the broader mechanics of what gets injected into context and how dsh compacts long sessions, see DeepSeek Harness Configuration Guide. If you're building your own skill pack as a plugin, Build a DeepSeek Harness Plugin from Scratch covers the packaging mechanics. For the full catalog, browse /plugins.