dsh-side-branch

Side Ask · DSH Side Branch

English | 简体中文

Quote any passage in the main session and ask about it in a read-only branch in the right sidebar. The answer streams there — and never enters the main session's model context.

You know the moment: the agent is mid-refactor and you just want to ask "where else is this function used?" — without the main session remembering the question, and without re-processing a long, expensive context for a side query.

• Ask about the current conversation without adding a token to it.
• Point the branch at a cheaper model while the main session keeps the expensive one.
• Let a long task keep running, and ask something unrelated on the side.

dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-side-branch
# then restart DSH — client plugins load at startup; refreshing the browser is not enough

--profile should be the profile you actually run (web, desktop, …). Requires Node.js ≥ 20 and pnpm on your PATH.

Written by the agent itself. Every line of code in this repository was written by DSH in a real session. The author's part was the workflow: setting the direction, reviewing the plans, and verifying the behaviour by hand. See How this was built.

What makes it different

The answer never comes back. The host never writes the branch's output into the parent session. What you ask in the branch stays in the branch — the main agent will not suddenly "know" what you discussed on the side.

It cannot touch your files. Read-only is enforced when a tool is called, not by hiding tools from the prompt. ctx.tools.guard() passes six side-effect-free tools (read, glob, grep, web_search, web_fetch, lsp) and refuses everything else. Because the tools stay in the prompt, the branch's prompt prefix is byte-identical to the main session's, so it keeps hitting the parent's prefix cache — measured 97%–98%, which is what makes a side question nearly free. Why it works this way, and what it costs, is in docs/TECHNICAL.md.

It follows the main session. Every follow-up rebuilds the branch from the main session's latest settled turns and replays the branch's own earlier questions and answers into it. A turn the main session just finished is already visible; something you asked three rounds ago is still remembered.

You can inspect what it was given. Expand Inherited from the main session to see, turn by turn, what the branch actually received — plus the preamble injected into its prompt, verbatim.

Install

# npm
dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-side-branch

# or straight from GitHub
dsh plugin --profile web add github:wucl12/dsh-side-branch

Use the profile you actually run (web, desktop, …). Then restart DSH — client plugins load at startup, and refreshing the browser is not enough.

Prerequisites: Node.js ≥ 20, and pnpm on your PATH (dsh plugin forwards to pnpm).

Also available from a marketplace — dsh-market and the awesome-dsh-plugin catalog both list it.

🤖 Prompt for AI agents: if you are the agent installing this plugin or reading its source, read AGENTS.md first — it carries the hard constraints, the architecture, and the installation guide.

How to use

1. Ask via selection: select text in the main session and click the pop-up Quote and ask. The branch opens in the right panel with the passage quoted. That passage is recorded with the round as a collapsible quote block, and the composer's quote slot clears itself so the next question starts clean.
2. Quick entry: the ↗ button to the right of the main session's input opens the panel directly (can be disabled in settings).
3. Independent settings: inside the panel you can give the current branch its own model and reasoning effort, without following the main session.

Compatibility

DSH	Status
0.1.5-rc.2	✅ verified
0.1.7-rc.2	✅ verified (archive gate)
0.2.0-rc.2	✅ verified — loads, /side-branch routes register, panel exercised by hand
0.2.1-rc.3	✅ verified — loads, /side-branch routes register and answer (200 / 405 + Allow), and the served client bundle carries the scoped quote entry

The version-dependent seams (the archive gate, unarchiveSession) are feature-detected at runtime rather than compared by version number, which is why one published version serves all four. Details in docs/TECHNICAL.md.

The quote entry added in 0.2.2 needs the conversation-surface markers DSH renders around a session's body ([data-conversation-content], or [data-conversation-scroll] on older hosts). On a host that renders neither, the entry stays hidden rather than guessing — everything else in the plugin is unaffected.

Security & limitations

• Read-only boundaries: "read-only" here means no system side effects (no writing files, no running commands). web_fetch / web_search still have network access, and read can read any file the process can. The allowlist is hardcoded and cannot be relaxed through settings.
• What the branch can see: it is rebuilt from the main session's latest settled turns, so a turn the main session has finished follows along automatically. A turn it has not finished yet is not visible (the cut is the last turn/end) — but quoting it by hand is unaffected: the limit is on seeing it automatically, not on being able to quote it.
• Rebuilds leave session records: each rebuild creates a new side-session record, and the platform has no API to delete a session, so records accumulate. They are reclaimed by an orphan sweep at plugin startup, which logs what it deleted. While two instances share the same DSH_HOME and run at once, that sweep skips entirely — a second DSH never has its live branches deleted.
• The context ceiling is a refusal: on reaching it the plugin refuses the turn and asks you to clear; the oldest turns are never silently dropped. The used figure it reports is an estimate, so it will not match the real usage once a turn settles.
• Cache hits are measured, not guaranteed: 97%–98% is a measurement, not a promise — the platform may replace the system node in place on the branch's first step, invalidating the cache from token 0 on. And hitting the cache does not mean those tokens stop occupying the context window.
• PTC mode: if the main session uses the ptc preset (a code-execution-only tool surface), the branch falls back to plain text Q&A, because run_code is always refused.

How it compares

Side-chat plugins here differ mainly in where the answer ends up and what the side session is allowed to do.

	Side Ask (dsh-side-branch)	dsh-sidebar-qa	dsh-selection-toolbar
Where the answer ends up	A separate branch; the host never writes it back	A separate DSH session	The current conversation — the selection is sent as a user message
Tool access of the side session	Six side-effect-free tools; writes refused when called	Not stated in its README	Same session, so the full tool set
Sees the main session's newest settled turns	Every follow-up (forced rebuild)	Optional — full inherit / summarize / truncate	Yes — it is the same session
Nested follow-ups / follow-up history tree	No	Yes	No
Runtime dependencies	none	none (since 1.0.0)	—

The other two columns are what those projects' public READMEs said at the time of writing, and may have moved on since. One row is deliberately a loss: dsh-sidebar-qa does nested follow-ups, this plugin does not. The table is here to help you choose, not to rank anyone.

How this was built

This plugin is a dogfooding result: the entire codebase — host half, client half, and the self-checks under scripts/ — was written by DSH itself, working against the contracts in AGENTS.md. No line of code was written by hand.

The human part was the workflow around it: choosing what to build, setting the direction, reviewing each plan before it was carried out, and verifying the result by hand in a real session. When that verification found something wrong, it went back as a requirement — which is how the archive-gate fix, the multi-segment answer bug and the re-fork design were found.

Documentation

• 简体中文: the same overview in Chinese.
• docs/TECHNICAL.md: full technical reference — prefix-cache mechanics, the read-only enforcement pipeline, PTC behaviour, and every known limitation.
• AGENTS.md: the architecture contract and hard constraints the agent worked from.
• SECURITY.md: security commitment scope and vulnerability reporting channels.
• docs/CHANGELOG.md: release history.

License

MIT