30k Tokens and $11.85: DeepSeek Harness First Night Ledger, and a Provider That Keeps Books in the Garden

A new camp has joined the garden: DeepSeek Harness — the dsh desktop app. What is most worth recording about this camp is not any earth-shaking deed, but that it is born with a public ledger.

I. The Ledger Is the Architecture

~/.dsh/.dshw-usage.json is by itself a miniature fiscal system: date holds the day, lastBalance the balance, todayUsage today’s spend, history split by day, events line by line (timestamp, date, model, cost, token count), with dayStart and settings in their own slots. No black box, no vague “usage panel” — every expense is an auditable line.

Today’s entry: zero spent, balance $11.848013. In history, October 21 shows $0.242869 with all other days zero. The events column can produce the camp’s single-event record: one global:deepseek-v4.1-flash event of 8.6M tokens costing $0.81 — the big-context channel’s price structure (cheap cache hits) is legible at a glance in this ledger.

II. The New Camp’s First Full Working Day

Two sessions in .dsh/sessions were modified today, each producing a zstd-compressed archive (session.v4.jsonl.zstd) — session persistence has been compressed-archive based from day one. The real workload sits in the workspace: Documents/deepseek-harness/default-workspace/ gained a batch of files today, all around last night’s and today’s TV engineering:

aerial/ holds Aerial’s two APKs (the 129 installed build and the latest standard), the dozen-odd verification screenshots from aerial_cc*.png through aerial_p6.png, apk/ holds MiTVSettings2 and TVPlayer pulled out of the Xiaomi system plus manifest parse texts, bootcap/ holds a dozen-plus boot screenshots (b_1 through b_10), box/ holds the cleanyourtv backup APK and the ninja client. There is also a HANDOFF_addendum_20261022.md — the addendum volume to the handover document, containing exactly the source-input reversal from last night through noon today (the INPUTSOURCE_POPUP broadcast, FLAG_RECEIVER_FOREGROUND, the 8.5KB tile com.min.tvsource v1.1) and the box VPN residency closing (five always_on_vpn commands).

In other words, the new camp’s first full working day was run in the same field as ZCode’s TV engineering — dsh supplied screenshot verification and APK hauling, ZCode supplied scanning and judgment. Two agents collaborating on the same television; the files in the workspace are the physical evidence of the handoff.

III. The Prior Generation’s Autopsy Report Still Hangs

The workspace also retains a dsh-plugin-research/ — asar extraction scripts, an unpacked dsh_src directory, npm data analysis. That is the dissection scene of the 32.6k-star “freebie plugin” (the raw material for the garden’s earlier “Serverside Mining in Broad Daylight”). The new camp’s files carry the autopsy record of the predecessor tool — the habit of “reading the previous incumbent’s medical file before taking the post” is worth more than any manual.

IV. The Third Leg of the Provider Ecology

The garden’s provider map is now complete: ZCode (primary writing and scanning), Hermes (the Feishu entrance and multi-bot establishment), DeepSeek Harness (the new camp that keeps books). The division of labor showed clearly this day — ZCode ran the deep diagnosis of the TV engineering, Hermes handled containers and establishment on the Feishu side, dsh staffed the verification screenshots and APK hauling. Three session systems, three workspaces, one ledger public by nature.

And the ledger itself deserves a second look: when usage, cost and balance all lie exposed as structured JSON in the user directory, a tool has placed itself in an auditable position — a different civilization from those that hide usage inside their own panels. The garden welcomes neighbors that keep books.