PC2005-cloud/dsh-pet

The problem

Desktop pets and overlay mascots usually mean hunting down a binary per OS, fighting with transparency support, and accepting whatever art the author shipped. Anyone who wants a different character, a different set of actions, or more than one pet on screen is on their own. dsh-pet takes a different angle: it installs as a plugin into DeepSeek Harness, renders as a transparent overlay in the browser and as an always-on-top Electron window on the desktop, and ships the prompt-and-pipeline used to turn source video into transparent animations so you can build new pets rather than only reskin the existing one.

What's different

Most pet/overlay projects are single-purpose binaries with a fixed animation set. dsh-pet is closer to a small runtime: an animation chain that picks the next clip by weight and cross-fades seamlessly, mirrored sprites for left/right facing, screen-edge-aware roaming and drag-throw physics shared between the web and desktop renderers, and multiple independently positioned instances. The distinguishing piece is the asset chain — a documented recipe from AI-generated video to VP9-alpha webm, plus a pet/ directory convention for adding whole new species. It also exposes an HTTP and in-page service API so other plugins can make the pet speak or play an animation, which turns it from decoration into a small presence layer.

Who it's for

Developers already running DeepSeek Harness who want ambient feedback on session state — thinking, working, error, success — or balance/usage indicators without opening a dashboard. Also a fit for people who want to author custom pet art with AI video tools and need the packaging side solved. Look elsewhere if you don't use DSH: the standalone mode is explicitly degraded, losing balance, chat, whispers and system notifications. Safari users should also skip or expect to swap in .mov assets, since webm alpha renders as a black box there.

Cost of adoption

You need Node.js, the DSH launcher and pnpm, and a DSH version close to 0.2.1-rc.2 per the README. Desktop mode pulls a roughly 100 MB Electron download into ~/.dsh/electron on first run, with mirror and version overrides via environment variables. Headless Linux is detected and degrades to browser-only with a warning. The project is MIT licensed and npm-published, but it is only about two months old and its README is unusually long and detailed while the API surface (HTTP with no auth, localhost only) is still clearly versioned to one host release.

Verdict

This is a brand-new project riding a real spike rather than an established one: created in mid-August 2026 with 3,915 stars and +3,147 in a single month on the TypeScript board, yet never on the daily trending board. That pattern suggests a burst of attention from a specific community — the DSH plugin ecosystem — rather than broad developer adoption. The engineering is more considered than the genre usually gets, especially the shared physics and the asset pipeline, but the tight coupling to one host version means you are adopting a young dependency. Worth trying if you already live in DSH; wait if you need stability.