Best Practices

Patterns distilled from real-world DeepSeek Harness projects. Follow these to keep your agents composable, secure, and maintainable.

Composition Patterns

• Prefer small plugins — one plugin, one responsibility. Small plugins are easier to test, reuse, and reason about.
• Publish shared services in the host composition — anything used across sessions (persistence, sandbox, model routes) belongs in the host, not in a single agent preset.
• Isolate preset-owned services — if only one agent needs a service, keep it inside that preset's isolate realm.

Security Hygiene

• Least privilege — grant each plugin only the permissions it actually needs.
• Review before running — treat every third-party plugin as untrusted code until you have read its source.
• Never commit secrets — keep credentials out of content and configuration repos.

Publishing Workflows

• Version everything — publish immutable versions so consumers can pin and roll back.
• Document before publishing — a plugin without docs is a support burden.
• Test updates — run an update in a staging composition before rolling it out.

[!TIP] When in doubt, keep the change small: a two-line plugin is easier to review than a two-hundred-line one.

Next Steps

• Browse the Plugin Catalog for vetted plugins
• Read the Quick Start if you are new to DSH