dsh-morning-paper
The front page for a session you left running: what happened, what broke, and
what is waiting on you — computed from the durable event log, never written by
a model.
It is a real Conversation View tab labelled Morning Paper, sitting next to
Chat and Trajectory, and it is set like a newspaper: a masthead, a
dateline, a boxed bulletin for anything waiting on you, a lede with a drop cap,
columns, and small print.
$ dsh --profile web # …you leave the tab open and come back 42 minutes later
============================================================================
THE MORNING PAPER - refactor auth
away 42m | 751 event(s) | 28m of wall clock | turn 18 | 0 action(s) required
============================================================================
LEAD: Turn 17 completed.
WHAT IT DID
9 turn(s): 8 finished, 0 blocked, 0 failed, 0 cancelled, 0 interrupted
140 tool call(s), 12 file(s) touched, 79 command(s) run (0 failed)
TURNS
turn took steps tools tokens outcome
10 57s 8 8 3,079,044 completed
11 4m 35 42 13,573,537 completed
13 9m 56 58 25,512,399 completed
18 24s 2 1 1,131,559 open
FILES (12 touched)
12x src/auth/session.ts
9x src/auth/token.ts
4x src/auth/__tests__/session.test.ts
... and 9 more file(s)
WHERE THE TIME WENT
##########...... 60.6% bash 1m (79 calls)
######.......... 37.8% ask_user_question 42s (1 calls)
#............... 0.6% edit 1s (25 calls)
longest single call: ask_user_question 42s
tool execution was 6.5% of the window; the rest was model time
WHERE THE MONEY WENT
turn 13 25,512,399 tokens 41% of the window 58 tools completed
turn 11 13,573,537 tokens 22% of the window 42 tools completed
turn 14 7,787,236 tokens 13% of the window 14 tools completed
BUSINESS
61,938,602 tokens | cache hit 99.9% | 11 message(s) from you
delivered:
- docs/refactor-plan.md
CORRECTIONS
3 tool failure(s): edit/FS_STALE_VERSION x2, read/FS_NOT_OBSERVED x1
1 model retry(ies)
UNRESOLVED (1)
18:24 edit failed: FS_STALE_VERSION (never retried)
YOU ASKED
- split the session token into its own module, keep it backward compatible
WEATHER
########................ 34% 340,115 of 1,000,000 tokens
route: deepseek-official/deepseek-flash
(Illustrative output — the shape is exactly what /briefing prints.)
The tab renders that same document as a three-page newspaper; /briefing prints
it as plain text in the transcript. One computed briefing, two renderings.
What it says that the chat does not
A chat is a linear list of messages. It cannot tell you:
- which files took the churn —
22x selftest.mjs is a fact no single
message contains;
- where the wall clock went — per-tool execution time, the longest single
call, and the split between tool execution and model time (6.5% of the window
above — the rest was the model thinking, which no transcript shows);
- which single turn ate the spend — turn 13 was 41% of a 62M-token window;
- what failed and was never retried — a failure followed by a later success
of the same tool is treated as handled; one with no later success is listed
with the exact failing command;
- what you asked for an hour ago, filtered to your own messages.
It deliberately does not quote the agent's reply. That is readable in the
chat, and restating it is what makes a briefing worthless. The lead is one line
of outcome; everything else is aggregation.
Three pages
The tab is paginated like a paper, and a page only exists when it has something
to say — a quiet session is a single sheet, not three pages of nothing.
| Page | Carries |
|---|
| 1 · Front | the action bulletin, the lead outcome, the what-it-did summary, what you asked, and context weather |
| 2 · The Log | the per-turn timeline, unresolved failures with their commands, and the corrections line |
| 3 · The Ledger | file churn, delivered files, where the time went, where the money went |
Page one gets the full nameplate; inner pages get a running head and a folio
(Page 2 of 3), with section links at the top and one footer row holding
previous/next beside the read controls. Switching sessions returns you to page one.
Page 1 · Front: an action bulletin for a pending approval, a one-line lead, the activity summary, what you asked, and a context-pressure gauge
Page 1 · Front — the bulletin, a one-line outcome instead of a quoted reply, the
activity summary, what you asked, and the context gauge. The lead says
Turn 9 ended blocked - the agent is waiting on you, which is the whole point of
opening this tab.
Page 2 · The Log: a per-turn timeline with duration, steps, tools, tokens and outcome, then unresolved failures with their commands and the corrections line
Page 2 · The Log — the timeline that shows a single turn taking 16 minutes and
3.1M tokens, the failures nobody retried with the command that failed, and the
corrections line.
Page 3 · The Ledger: file churn counted per file, delivered files, per-tool execution time as bars, and a per-turn spend ranking
Page 3 · The Ledger — file churn counted per file, what was delivered, where the
wall clock went (and how little of it was tool execution), and which turns ate
the spend.
Screenshots are generated by node tools/screenshot.mjs from the shipped
stylesheet and render tree, so they cannot drift from the code.
/briefing prints the same document as one continuous column, because a
transcript cannot be flipped. Pagination is presentation, not data, so the text
rendering and the tab share one computed briefing.
Why it is trustworthy
The briefing is computed, never generated. Zero tokens, no hallucination,
byte-identical for the same log and clock. If you want prose about a session,
/briefing plus the agent can produce it — this plugin deliberately does not.
It never enters your context. The page is derived state. Nothing here calls
inject(), appends a session event, or sends anything to a model. The one path
that touches the transcript is the /briefing command, which you invoke. The
selftest asserts this.
Two scope rules
A front page answers two different questions, so two different reads:
| Question | Source |
|---|
| What happened while I was away? | only events after the seq your browser last showed you |
| What needs me right now? | the whole log — an approval asked before you left is still waiting, and a turn that ended blocked an hour ago is still blocked |
Fork-inherited events are excluded from the "what happened" counts and named in
a notes line. If you forked a session, its inherited prefix did not happen
here; readSession reports the exact prefix length, so the page cannot inflate
your agent's work with someone else's.
Install
dsh plugin --profile web add -w dsh-morning-paper
# restart dsh web, then reload the page
From a checkout, if you are working on the plugin itself:
git clone https://github.com/damlys99/dsh-morning-paper
dsh plugin --profile web add -w link:/absolute/path/to/dsh-morning-paper
Requires DSH >=0.1.2-alpha.1 <0.2.0-0. The row is added to the profile
automatically; a restart is required because both the host module and the client
bundle are composed at boot, and patchReload: live only watches patch files.
Uninstall:
dsh plugin --profile web remove dsh-morning-paper
The context ceiling
WEATHER is a gauge: a filled bar, the percentage beside it, the raw figures, and
the route it measured — because a percentage buried in a sentence is the one
thing you cannot read at a glance. It compares the session's current request
pressure against the routed model's own declared capacity. DeepSeek's adapter declares one — every model in
its catalog carries a contextWindow, 1,000,000 tokens on the current routes —
and the plugin reads it through ctx.llm.resolveModelInfo(), the same call
automatic compaction uses to decide when to compact. So the percentage is the
number DSH itself is working from, not an estimate.
The route is read from the newest request/header event in the log rather than
from the agent's options, because a session on the default model never sets a
provider explicitly, and the ceiling belongs to the route that actually ran.
A plugin-config ceiling is a fallback for adapters that declare nothing:
# ~/.dsh/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml
- id: morning-paper
config:
contextWindow: 128000
A model-declared capacity always wins over it, and a configured one is labelled
wherever it is shown because it is an assumption rather than a fact. An invalid
value is ignored. With neither, the page reports the token count and says the
ceiling is unknown rather than inventing a percentage.
The command
/briefing # the whole session, as text in the transcript
/briefing --since 812 # only what happened after seq 812
What reads what
| Need | Seam |
|---|
| The log | ctx.sessionQuery.readSession() — concrete, so no search backend is required |
| The log tail | ctx.sessionQuery.listEvents() — metadata only; the cheap half of the auto-refresh poll |
| The title | ctx.sessionQuery.readTitle() |
| Pending approvals | durable approval/asked minus approval/decided — survives a host restart |
| Turn outcome | turn/end reasons: completed, blocked, error, aborted, max-tokens, interrupted |
| Failures, retries, compactions | tool/result.error, llm/retry*, compaction/* |
| Cost | assistant/message.usage — disjoint input / cache-read / cache-write / output buckets |
| Context pressure | ctx.tokenMeter.measure() + ctx.llm.resolveModel() for the model's declared window |
| Pending questions | the live user-questions/request waterfall (in memory only — see limits) |
| The route | ctx.webServer.register({ kind: 'exact', path: '/morning-paper' }) |
| The page | conversation.view, one tab labelled Morning Paper, next to Chat and Trajectory. No DOM decoration, no MutationObserver |
Optional services (agents, tokenMeter, llm, commands) are resolved with
ctx.get at use time. A composition without them still mounts and still serves
the durable half of the page; a headless profile loses only the weather line.
Refusals
Every guard runs before any work, so a refused request changes nothing.
| Code | Status | When |
|---|
BAD_REQUEST | 400 | Missing or malformed sessionId / sinceSeq / format |
SESSION_NOT_FOUND | 404 | No live or persisted session with that id |
MARKER_AHEAD | 409 | Your reading marker is past the log tail. The browser forgets the marker and shows the whole session rather than a stale page |
LOG_TOO_LARGE | 413 | Above 20,000 events, which is more than this plugin will read in one request |
SUBAGENT_OWNED | 409 | A subagent session's briefing belongs to its parent |
BRIEFING_FAILED | 502 | The log could not be read |
Deliberate limits
- Pending questions are live-only.
dsh-user-questions declares no durable
session event, so a pending question cannot be found in a cold log after a host
restart. The watermark is set when the waterfall opens and cleared when it
settles, so it can never nag about a question you already answered — but it is
also absent after a restart. Approvals have no such limitation.
- No full-text search.
dsh-session-query-sqlite ships mounted with
openAt: never, so this plugin uses only the concrete reads and depends on no
search backend.
- Windows are truncated, not refused. Above 5,000 new events the page
summarises the newest 5,000 and says so in a note.
readSession clones the whole log. That is the ceiling that produces
LOG_TOO_LARGE; if it bites on real sessions, the fallback is a tail read of
the JSONL, which would couple this plugin to the on-disk format.
Page behaviour
- A first visit shows the whole session. A page that greets you with silence
reads as broken, so the first render is the full history and the small print
says so.
Mark all read starts the tracking window from that point.
- After that, the window is yours. The dateline reads
since 18:12 · away 3h 12m and covers only what happened since you last read
it; a whole-session read says whole session · 45m of work and never claims an
away duration it did not measure.
- It refreshes itself. A turn that just ended is read a beat after the run
state flips; while the agent is working the tab polls every 5s, every 20s when
idle, and immediately when you come back to it. The recurring poll asks the
host for the log tail only — the expensive log read happens only when the
tail actually moved — and nothing is polled while the tab is in the
background.
Mark all read never blanks the page. It advances the reading marker and
leaves what you just read on screen, with a line saying when you marked it; the
next new events appear on the following refresh. The previous behaviour —
clearing the page on the click — read as "my paper just vanished".
Show whole session forgets the marker to re-read everything.- The footer is one row, like a paper's folio line: page navigation on the
left, the read/refresh controls on the right, with the small print beneath it.
A single-sheet paper shows no navigation at all.
- A quiet session still renders a page saying there is no news, rather than an
empty tab that looks broken.
- It never acts for you. An approval item tells you what is waiting and where
to answer it; the page does not re-implement the approval surface.
- The palette is fixed, not themed. A newspaper is cream paper with dark ink
in every theme, so the sheet and the ink are literal values rather than theme
tokens. Every text tier is contrast-checked in the selftest: body ink 15.7:1,
secondary 10.4:1, the faint tier 7.2:1 on the sheet, and the accent
heading 5.6:1 on the bulletin tint.
This is a deliberate correction: the first version mixed the sheet from
--dsw-alias-* variables whose names I had guessed, and --dsw-alias-bg-elevated
/ --dsw-alias-border-secondary do not exist, so the sheet fell back to cream
while the label token resolved light — unreadable. The selftest now fails if the
palette ever depends on a theme token again.
Tests
node selftest.mjs # 131 assertions, no network, no browser, no build
node verify-real-log.mjs # build briefings from the session logs on this machine
node tools/screenshot.mjs # regenerate the images on this page (repo tool)
tools/screenshot.mjs renders the three pages with the shipped PAPER_CSS and
paperTree, photographs them with headless chromium, and rewrites
screenshots.json. It needs a chromium binary and ImageMagick, so it is a repo
tool rather than runtime code, and it is excluded from the published package.
selftest.mjs covers the pure core, every refusal, the request decoder, the HTTP
surface, the live watermark, the command, the text renderer, and the real
client bundle evaluated in a node:vm sandbox — including its render tree,
built with a test element factory, and the stylesheet, so page content and
styling are covered without React.
verify-real-log.mjs reads the logs DSH actually wrote under
$DSH_HOME/sessions/ and builds a briefing from each, checking determinism,
non-mutation and renderability on real event payloads. It is a dev tool: session
logs are concatenated zstd frames, so it shells out to the zstd CLI, which the
plugin itself never does — the plugin reads through ctx.sessionQuery.
Real-log verification has already earned its keep twice:
- it caught the page emitting a non-ASCII truncation marker and unsanitized model
text, so quoted content is now stripped of control characters and clipped with
an ASCII marker;
- it caught the tool-call id being read from the wrong place. The id lives at
tool/result.message.source.callId; without it there was no pairing, no
per-tool timing, no command counting, and failure groups had no tool name. The
entire Where the time went section exists because real data found that.
Caveats
- The route discloses session content to any caller on the loopback
interface.
GET /morning-paper?sessionId=… returns a session title, file
paths, failing commands, failure codes and token counts without the
GUI's session cookie — the same posture as the rest of the plugin HTTP surface,
but the payload here is conversation content, so it is worth stating plainly.
Session ids are unguessable UUIDs, the response is derived and capped, and a
cross-site browser request is blocked because the response carries no CORS
headers. If you bind this port beyond loopback, treat the whole plugin HTTP
surface as trusted-network-only, not just this plugin.
- The page is a
conversation.view entry. That slot id and its label
option are published contracts in docs/subsystems/slots.md, not private
markup — unlike a DOM-decorating plugin, a restructured composer or dock cannot
break this one.
- The stylesheet is injected, not bundled. One
<style> element with a
dmp- class prefix is appended to document.head on first render. There is no
CSS file and no build step, so there is no CSS-module contract to depend on.
- Verified against DSH
0.1.5-rc.1 contracts, in a browser-less harness and
against real session logs, and then used in a live browser — that pass is what
produced the footer, read-state and dateline corrections above.
- Published as
dsh-morning-paper. The
images ship inside the tarball so npm's README render resolves them.
License
MIT
