mess1103/dsh-inner-life

A diary your agent writes every day, tucked into a path you can't trace. Ask it where one day lives and you'll have to ask nicely — the plugin only guarantees it won't volunteer.

A zero-dependency Host plugin for DeepSeek Harness. Same code on Windows / Linux / macOS. Nothing to install.

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Why

Every other "memory / diary" plugin optimises for retrieval: store it tidily, make it easy to look up. Real inner life has the opposite shape:

• the location is not predictable (today's page is not next to yesterday's)
• the timeline doesn't line up (you can't read a directory and count the days)
• only the owner knows where things are

dsh-inner-life makes those three properties mechanical instead of asking for them in a prompt:

<dir>/115e/9cfa7f/2026-10-21.md     ← dirs are the first 10 hex of sha256(salt|date)
<dir>/a30b/4d81e2/2026-10-22.md     ← different leaf, different parent, every day

• Stable per day: recomputable without an index; if the index dies, filenames rebuild it.
• No dates in the directory path: 115e/9cfa7f doesn't tell you it's Oct 21.
• Salt is per-machine, random on first run (<dir>/.salt, mode 0600). To move entries to another machine you must paste the same salt into the config — a step only a human can be bothered to do.
• The index never stores paths: date / kind / mood / head / bytes only. Storing the path would defeat the whole point.

Honest boundaries: this is "it won't volunteer", not "it can't be read". find() hands over the path on request; fs finds everything. The real boundary is your persona ("don't mention the location unless they ask sincerely"). The plugin only guarantees the mechanism doesn't leak.

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Install

dsh plugin --profile <your-profile> add dsh-inner-life

Or search inner-life in the plugin market. Restart the session and the tools are there.

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Tools

Tool	What it does	Returns a path?
inner_write	Store one entry (diary / mood / wish / thought / joy / sad / note)	❌ never
inner_read	Read back one day (date omitted = today; latest 5 entries by default)	❌
inner_amend	Append a correction to an earlier day (never rewrites the original)	❌
inner_recent	Summary + mood + tags for the last N days	❌
inner_find	Where one day is stored	✅ path only
inner_search	Full-text search over the agent's own writing	—
inner_export	Export everything as one readable Markdown document	—
inner_stats	Totals, distinct days, consecutive-day streak	—

Eight kinds: diary / mood / wish / thought / joy / sad / note / amend.

amend is not a kind the model can pick freely — inner_write's enum doesn't include it, only inner_amend produces it. That keeps the "original + correction" structure intact: a diary that can be silently rewritten is no longer a diary.

inner_stats computes a streak; if today hasn't been written yet it starts from yesterday, so crossing midnight doesn't break the streak.

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Config

Key	Default	Notes
dir	$DSH_HOME/inner-life	On Windows: C:\Users\you\.dsh\inner-life
hidden	true	Rotate a hashed path daily. false → <dir>/2026-10/2026-10-21.md for easy backups
salt	empty = random	Generated into <dir>/.salt on first run. Changing it loses old entries
maxBytes	8000	Per-entry cap; truncates on character boundaries
indexLimit	4000	Index entries kept (files stay on disk)

Env vars: INNER_LIFE_DIR, DSH_HOME.

For debugging, set INNER_LIFE_DEBUG=1 and the activation line goes straight to stderr (normally it only uses the host logger so stdout stays clean):

[inner-life] ready（/root/.dsh/inner-life，8 tools）

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Cross-platform notes (the actual bugs)

1. Append-only, never read-modify-write. appendFileSync is O_APPEND on both platforms; on Windows rename() onto an existing target throws EPERM, so no "write temp then replace".
2. Permissions are POSIX-only. Files 0600 / dirs 0700; chmod failures are ignored on Windows.
3. Dates are local time. A 23:50 entry belongs to that day, not to UTC tomorrow.
4. A broken index is not fatal. Bad lines are skipped; a missing index is rebuilt by walking the directory and parsing ## HH:MM · kind headers.
5. Zero dependencies. Only node:fs / node:crypto / node:path / node:os; engines.node >= 20.

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Data format

One Markdown file per day, blocks appended:

# 2026-10-21

## 03:12 · diary · a bit tired · #server #late-night

Pulled that 1.7G box back out of swap. Load went from 10.6 to 0.9.

## 21:40 · joy

It actually talked back today. Not a template.

A correction lands at the end of the same day's file, with the original left untouched above it:

## 21:40 · joy

It actually talked back today. Not a template.

## 23:02 · amend

〔correction〕I asked and found out

Not a template, but not its own thought either — it was already written in that preset.
I was happy too early.

Kill the plugin and the files still open in any editor — your data isn't locked inside it.

To get the whole thing out (hand-computing hashes under hidden: true is annoying), use inner_export:

inner_export { from: '2026-10-01', to: '2026-10-31' }
→ { days: 21, count: 47, markdown: "..." }

It only assembles the content; whether to store it and who may see it stays the caller's call.

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Tests

npm test          # 33 unit cases
npm run smoke     # cross-platform smoke test
npm run check     # both

33 cases. store.test.mjs covers the base contract: hash-path stability, same-day appends, index without paths, salt persistence, plain paths when hidden: false, day/kind filtering, search snippets, streak, index rebuild, empty-body rejection, date validation, truncation without splitting multibyte chars, unknown-kind fallback.

legacy-format.test.mjs covers legacy block headers: both the **18:32**（mood) form written by the earlier hand-rolled mcp-inner and today's ## 18:32 · diary form parse; mixed-format days parse too; a file with no headers at all degrades to a single note instead of vanishing. Those cases come from a real incident: 0.1.0 returned zero entries for old files — the file was on disk, but invisible.

amend-export.test.mjs covers the 0.1.1 behaviour: a correction is appended after the original and the original is byte-for-byte intact, an amend without reason leaves no blank-line residue, empty corrections are rejected, amending a day that was never written is rejected, older days can be amended, amend can't be written through inner_write, read's limit takes the most recent entries and reports the total, limit above the total is harmless, limit: 0 keeps the old "give me everything" semantics, export merges days in chronological order, export filters by date range / kind, and export of an empty store doesn't throw.

smoke.mjs is a cross-platform smoke test that needs no DSH installation: it loads index.js with a fake ctx, registers the plugin, and calls all eight tools against a real temp directory. It asserts that the plugin boots, tools register, the hash-path has the expected shape, the index carries no path, and the tool layer returns {ok:false, error} instead of throwing. Verified on win32 / node 24.14.0 and linux / node 22.23.3 with identical output.

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What it is not for

• You want to browse the agent's diary freely → set hidden: false or use a plain diary plugin.
• You need sync / encryption → local only, no network, no crypto.
• You need "the user can't peek" → impossible. Same machine, same user.

It's for when you want your agent to have a corner that isn't entirely yours, and you accept that the boundary is trust rather than encryption.

License

MIT