dsh-smart-model-router
A host-plane Cordis plugin for DeepSeek Harness that adds a virtual Auto model. Explicit model selections pass through unchanged. Selecting Auto chooses a real provider/model for each step from task difficulty and optional quota pressure.
Why
Model catalogs make manual selection easy, but a useful default must answer two separate questions:
- How much capability does this task need?
- Which quota pool should be conserved right now?
This plugin answers both at the agent/request extension point. The resolved real provider, model, and reasoning effort are then written by DSH to the normal request/header, so replay and audit observe the route actually used rather than the virtual Auto alias.
Behavior
The default candidate set targets the ChatGPT subscription adapter: Spark, 5.4 Mini, and 5.6 Sol. Each candidate declares operator-estimated quality, speed, economy, task affinities, modalities, and quota bucket.
Routing is a multi-stage utility decision rather than a four-tier keyword lookup:
- Extract semantic and structural features for coding, analysis, writing, risk, agentic work, long context, images, constraints, tool history, and step depth.
- Query the live DSH model registry and reject unavailable or modality-incompatible candidates.
- Score eligible candidates across quality, speed, economy, task affinity, quota headroom, and reserve pressure.
- Select deterministically and log the winner, score, demand, quota, alternatives, and rejected candidates.
Quality receives more weight as demand rises; speed and economy receive more weight for low-demand work. If quota retrieval fails, capability and task routing continue. See the routing design for the formula, open-source references, evidence policy, and evaluation limits.
Explicit selection always wins
The plugin only rewrites this exact virtual route:
dsh-auto/dynamic
Any concrete selection—Codex, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM, or another registered provider—is returned by identity and is never overridden.
Install
dsh plugin --profile web add dsh-smart-model-router
Restart DSH Web, then choose Auto (difficulty + quota) from the model selector. To make Auto the default for new sessions, set:
agent-default-model:
provider: dsh-auto
model: dynamic
in ~/.dsh/settings.yaml.
Configuration
The bundle inserts one host plugin row. Override it in your profile's cordis.patch.yml:
- id: smart-model-router
config:
displayName: Auto (capability + quota)
quotaStatusUrl: http://127.0.0.1:3080/api/dsh-chatgpt-subscription/status
quotaCacheMs: 60000
policy:
qualityWeight: 1
speedWeight: 0.36
economyWeight: 0.44
quotaWeight: 0.65
reservePercent: 8
reservePenalty: 1.4
quota:
enabled: true
# candidates is an array of provider/model, modalities, quotaBucketId,
# quality/speed/economy estimates, and per-task affinity weights.
All candidates, estimates, affinities, policy weights, quota reserves, and endpoint settings are Cordis config; deployments do not need to edit source. The complete default candidate objects are in src/core.js.
Architecture
- Host plane: routing and quota state are shared across sessions.
- Virtual adapter: registers Auto in the standard model catalog and fails closed if unresolved.
agent/request waterfall: calls next(), preserves explicit selections, and replaces only the Auto alias.- Reconstructability: DSH logs the resolved concrete route in
request/header before dispatch.
- Lifecycle: adapter and event registrations belong to the plugin Fiber and disappear on unload/HMR.
Quota integration
Version 0.2 reads the authenticated dsh-chatgpt-subscription status endpoint through loopback HTTP. This keeps the plugin standalone but is the main upstream-integration limitation: a provider-neutral read-only quota Service would remove the HTTP and fixed-port coupling. The router deliberately treats the signal as optional.
Development
npm install --ignore-scripts
npm run check
npm run benchmark
npm run smoke:real-dsh
npm run pack:check
The test suite covers feature extraction, utility scoring, capability rejection, quota reserves, explicit-selection precedence, missing quota, virtual model registration, routing, and real DSH mount/unload lifecycle. The transparent regression corpus currently contains 12 representative tasks; it is a policy drift check, not a scientific model-quality benchmark.
Security and privacy
The plugin sends no task text to a classifier service. Classification is local. The optional quota fetch targets the configured URL and reads only quota percentages. Configure a trusted loopback or authenticated endpoint.
Known limitations and upstream path
- Local semantic features remain a deterministic approximation; trained routers such as RouteLLM or RoRF can outperform them when representative preference labels exist.
- Default quality, speed, economy, and affinity values are operator estimates, not vendor benchmark facts. Deployments should calibrate them on their workloads.
- The current quota source follows the community ChatGPT subscription plugin's HTTP API rather than a DSH quota capability.
- The virtual adapter is a compatibility technique until DSH has a first-class virtual route registry.
The intended upstream path is to propose a provider-neutral quota-status capability and a first-class virtual model route abstraction, then migrate this plugin onto those APIs. The policy engine and tests are intentionally independent of the HTTP transport to support that migration.
License
MIT
