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Running dsh on Windows — DeepSeek Harness Guide

There is no official DeepSeek Harness desktop application, on Windows or anywhere else. dsh web starts a local web server and you use it in a browser. Windows also carries a set of known sandbox bugs that are worth reading before you let dsh write to your filesystem.

All of it comes from one community bug report, Discussion #758, filed against 0.1.0-rc.6 on Windows 11 (build 26200.8875) with Node v24.16.0. The P0–P2 severities are the reporter’s own labels. DeepSeek hasn’t classified any of these.

Known sandbox issues

Section titled “Known sandbox issues”

P0 Temp cleanup permanently crashes the sandbox

Section titled “ Temp cleanup permanently crashes the sandbox”

The Windows sandbox runner (windows-acl-run) keeps its working state in a fixed directory under %TEMP%\dsh-XXXXXX. Delete that directory and every later sandboxed command fails. A routine Remove-Item $env:TEMP\* -Recurse -Force is enough to do it. The error you get back suggests installing bubblewrap or Landlock, which are Linux, or checking sandbox-exec, which is macOS. None of the three exist on Windows.

Verified workaround: recreate the directory named in the error, empty. Windows sandbox crashes after clearing Temp has the commands.

P2 -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue hides sandbox denials

Section titled “ -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue hides sandbox denials”

Add -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue to a PowerShell command the sandbox would deny and the sandbox’s own [sandbox: file access denied under ...] marker disappears along with everything else. What comes back is a bare [exit code: 1], which looks the same as an ordinary Windows ACL denial. The reporter took one for the other and went hunting for a privilege problem to elevate past.

P1 Restricted token blocks read-only system queries

Section titled “ Restricted token blocks read-only system queries”

The ACL-restricted token the sandbox runs under blocks several read-only WMI/CIM queries:

  • Get-Volume -DriveLetter C → Access denied (HRESULT 0x80041003)
  • Get-NetTCPConnection -LocalPort <port> → no output, exit code 1
  • Get-PSDrive C → runs without error, but Used/Free are always 0

So from inside the sandbox you can’t check disk free space, and you can’t find out which process holds a port.

P1 UAC elevation fails silently

Section titled “ UAC elevation fails silently”

Start-Process -Verb RunAs inside the sandbox, via either powershell or cmd, returns immediately with no output, no error, and no UAC prompt. The elevated command doesn’t run. The exit code looks clean, so check the result of anything that needed elevation instead of trusting it.

P2 Constrained Language Mode noise on every command

Section titled “ Constrained Language Mode noise on every command”

Every sandboxed PowerShell command prints two fixed errors to stderr:

Cannot create type. Only core types are supported in this language mode.

The source is boilerplate the executor injects itself, an output-encoding setup snippet that constructs a .NET static type, and Constrained Language Mode blocks that inside the sandbox. Your command still ran. The noise shows up on every invocation regardless.

No official desktop app

Section titled “No official desktop app”

There is no first-party dsh desktop client. If you want a native window rather than a browser tab, what exists is community-built wrappers around the same dsh web server. Three of them were on GitHub when this was written, none affiliated with DeepSeek and none endorsed here. Look them over before you give one access to your machine.

Searching GitHub for dsh-desktop turns up more. Maturity and trustworthiness vary a lot, and the list above is neither complete nor a recommendation.

Source

Section titled “Source”

Discussion #758 — Windows sandbox (workspace-write): permanent crash after Temp cleanup (P0) + 4 related issues

Section titled “Related pages”