DeepSeek Harness Prose Standard

Write enough to preserve the contract, then remove reasoning transcripts, repetition, and decoration. A contract is an obligation, invariant, precondition, postcondition, or compatibility promise that a caller, callee, implementer, producer, or consumer relies on. This skill owns editorial judgment and required prose coverage; use dsh-doc for placement, budgets, bilingual pairs, and documentation gates, and dsh-trim-cot-leakage for hunting and fixing reasoning-transcript leakage. It is guidance, not a script.

Treat contract, boundary, shape, surface, seam, gate, and vocabulary as terms to check before use, not banned words. First ask whether the exact rule, API, field set, type, validation, timing point, component split, or failure states the fact better. Keep a term when it names the exact technical subject, including caller/callee contracts and security/process boundaries.

Comments describe non-obvious contracts or rationale that code cannot express; they do not restate what code already implies.

Inputs and exclusions

Require an explicit scope. If it is missing, report the required input and stop; do not infer a repository-wide scope or begin an interview.

Accept mode: automatic | interactive; default to automatic. Enter interactive mode only when the user explicitly requests questions or calibration.

mode controls questions, not write authority. Review and audit tasks report findings without editing; explicitly requested write, fix, or trim tasks apply clear changes.

Always exclude vendor/ from discovery, review, and edits, even when the requested scope is the whole repository. Do not follow a symlink into it. Put exclusions after inclusion globs so a later include cannot re-admit it: for example, end ripgrep commands with --glob '!vendor/**', and give Git commands an explicit :(exclude)vendor/** pathspec. If the requested scope contains only vendor/, report that no eligible files remain.

Also exclude .agents/notes/archived/ from prose review and edits. Archived Agent Notes are frozen snapshots; inspect an exact target only to understand a historical inbound citation, never to modernize its prose or outbound links.