dsh-todo-continuity

dsh-todo-continuity

Keeps an unfinished task list visible across turns.

DSH clears the todos projection at the start of every turn, expecting the model to rewrite the whole list. When a turn is interrupted, the list is durably in the session log but gone from the UI — and todo_write is write-only, so neither you nor the model can read it back. This plugin re-appends the last list when a turn starts and that list still has unfinished work.

The behaviour it addresses

packages/todo/tool-todo/src/index.ts:130-145 — the fold, and its own comment describing it as intentional:

// Standing-plan fold: latest whole todo/write list, cleared by the next
// turn/start (turn/end keeps the finished checklist visible); null before the
// first write or after a later turn begins; every other event returns the
// same state reference.
apply: (state, event) => {
  if (event.type === 'todo/write') return event.data.todos
  if (event.type === 'turn/start') return null
  return state
},
stateVersion: 2,

Rewriting each turn is a deliberate design — the tool description tells the model to send the entire list every call. The problem is the interrupted case: the next turn/start clears the list anyway, and todo_write (:203-222) only appends snapshots and returns counts, so there is no way to read the previous list back. The plan is not lost — it is in the log — but it is unreachable from the UI, and the model has no way to recover it either.

This is community addition #21 to the verified unfixed-issue list in DSH discussion #6520.

What the plugin does

Registers one ordinary session/event listener. It remembers the last todo/write list per session, and when a turn/start arrives whose remembered list still has unfinished items, it appends that list back as a fresh todo/write. A projection is a pure fold over the durable log, so appending the event the fold reacts to restores the state — nothing else needs to change.

Deliberately narrow:

• Only unfinished lists. A list with everything completed is left to the built-in behaviour, so the plugin changes nothing about the case it does not exist for.
• Once per turn start. At most one extra event per turn/start.
• No fork. It does not disable or replace tool-todo. It cannot: the projection registry refcounts a repeated key only at an equal stateVersion and throws on a mismatch (session-projection/src/index.ts:276-283), so the first definition always wins. Appending is the reachable seam.
• No waterfall. It registers no pre-execute / pre-step / llm/stream hook, so it has no next() obligation and cannot swallow another plugin's behaviour.
• Fails open. If the append cannot be made, the caller keeps exactly the built-in behaviour.

Verified

A controlled A/B on real sessions — two identical headless runs differing only in whether this plugin was installed, both folded through the real todos projection definition. Raw output in EVIDENCE.md:

	real events	folded final state
without the plugin	turn/start#4 → todo/write#24 → turn/end#47 → turn/start#49 → turn/end#51	null — list gone
with the plugin	… → turn/start#49 → **todo/write#51** → turn/end#52	the 3-item list

The extra event has no tool/call or tool/result behind it (unlike the model's own todo_write), and the control run has no such event at all — which is what establishes that the plugin caused it.

Install

dsh plugin --profile web add github:apex-mochen/dsh-todo-continuity

Restart the profile afterwards.

Configuration

- id: dsh-todo-continuity
  config:
    verbose: false   # log each carry-over
    enabled: true    # set false to keep it installed but inert

Two implementation notes worth knowing

The append is deferred by a microtask, and that is required, not stylistic. Session.append publishes its event to listeners while its own acceptance boundary is still open, and rejects a reentrant append (core/session/src/index.ts:729-731, "session append cannot reenter while another append is being published"; the flag is set at :742, listeners run at :752, cleared in finally at :757). A session/event listener runs inside that window, so an inline append throws every time — and because this plugin fails open, it would have silently done nothing. An earlier version made exactly that mistake; source reading caught it before any run.

Listener order works out. The projection registry has already folded turn/start to null by the time this plugin's listener runs: on pushes unless prepend is set (vendor/cordis/src/events.ts:255), dispatch preserves that order (:172-174), emit invokes them synchronously and forward (:194-196), and the registry registers in its own constructor while the base bundle loads.

Compatibility

• DSH 0.1.x (peer: @deepseek-ai/cordis ^4.0.1)
• Node.js 20+
• One implementation file, zero dependencies, no process/filesystem/network access

This overrides a designed behaviour

Per-turn clearing is documented as intentional, so this plugin is a deliberate product-semantics change, not a bug fix — scoped as narrowly as it can be. The alternative fix is upstream: clear only when the list has nothing left to do. DSH does not accept external pull requests today (CONTRIBUTING.md), so a plugin is the reachable seam.

License

MIT