$DSH_HOME/.env had just become an ordinary environment layer, which left the
harness resolving user-facing values from a flattened process.env that could
no longer say where a value came from. A key stored through the web page
stayed shadowed by an older key in the user's own .env. An endpoint could be
redirected by the project: the invoking directory's .env is materialized like
every other layer, and a base URL decides where a resolved API key is sent, so
a DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL written into a model-editable workspace would send the
user's credential — and the prompts carrying their code — to whatever host
that file named.
Give every user-facing value one ordering, with four kinds of source:
explicit for this run per-operation override, CLI argument
> authored by deployment --config / --config-replace
> this launch's shell inherited process environment
> product-managed store settings.yaml, .credentials.yaml
> discovered file $DSH_HOME/.env
> defaults schema default, shipped base, public default
The domains differ only in which tiers exist. The earlier split — credentials
ranking the environment over the managed file while settings ranked over the
environment — was inconsistent: the distinguishing fact is who authored the
source, not the domain.
packages/util/environment owns an immutable snapshot with per-layer
provenance. getFrom(name, sources) searches only the layers a caller names,
and omitting one is a refusal rather than a demotion: the adapters ask for
['process', 'user-env'], so no reordering can let a project file back into a
decision it was excluded from.
isBootstrapOnly rejects, before anything is materialized, any .env setting a
variable that governs how a process launches (PATH, SHELL, NODE_OPTIONS,
LD_PRELOAD), where code or model-visible instructions load from (the whole
DSH_* namespace, HOME, XDG_*), or how the network is reached (proxy and CA
variables). The namespace is denied wholesale so a switch added later cannot
become settable by being forgotten, and there is no opt-out.
verify-config-source-ownership keeps both rules: no unregistered process.env
read under packages/*/*/src (26 allowlisted with reasons), and no apiKey,
baseURL, or headers inlined from the environment in shipped Cordis config —
removing those inlines is what makes the deployment tier meaningful.
$DSH_HOME/config.yaml was an implicit composition layer: if the file existed,
every launch applied an arbitrary Loader patch graph over the shipped tree,
kept live by a dedicated HMR watcher. Three costs came from the implicitness,
not the capability. A patch replaces its target row's whole config, so a file
written months ago pins that row to the field set it knew and every default
the shipped tree later adds silently stops applying. It competed with the
typed settings namespaces llm-deepseek and llm-pi-ai already register, so
which one wins was a function of layer order rather than meaning. And the
explicit escape hatch it was supposedly redundant with did not exist on every
surface: dsh -p, dsh meta, and dsh upgrade all rejected --config, so for them
the implicit file was the only composition route at all.
Complete the explicit layer first: --config and --config-replace now work on
every booting surface. A headless --config-replace tree must still mount a
webserver row, because that surface reaches its own agent over the same HTTP
gateway the browser uses; AppCLIEntry names that contract in the failure
instead of reporting a bare missing service.
Then delete the implicit one. PERSONAL_CONFIG_FILENAME, loadPersonalPatches,
watchPersonalPatches, and the config-only HMR row mounted for it are gone; a
file left at that path is inert, and --dump-config no longer reads the Harness
home. --config therefore stops *replacing* the personal overlay and simply
*is* the user overlay.
No migration: a user who wants the old behavior names the same file
(dsh --config ~/.dsh/config.yaml), which a shell alias makes permanent.
$DSH_HOME/.env carried two incompatible jobs. As credentials-local's writable
secret store it could not be hoisted into process.env — hoisting makes every
stored key read as a read-only launch override and blocks rotation from the
TUI and the web page. But its name and dotenv format promise an environment
file, so a DEEPSEEK_BASE_URL sitting beside a working DEEPSEEK_API_KEY in the
same file was silently ignored: only the credential provider read the
document, and it addresses credential references alone.
Split the two jobs into two files.
.credentials.yaml is the provider-managed store: a strict YAML mapping of
CredentialRef to non-empty string, no version field, no wrapper level. Because
it holds credentials and nothing else, a non-mapping root, a non-identifier
key, a non-string value, an empty string, a duplicate key, and malformed YAML
are all rejections rather than skipped entries — loud at boot and at a write,
warn-and-keep-last-good on a live reload. The dotenv physical-line editor
gives way to a patch of the parsed document, so comments and untouched entries
keep their formatting and any string value round-trips, multi-line included.
Writer lock, read-modify-write, atomic 0600 write under a 0700 directory,
watcher, self-write suppression, and quiescent disposal are unchanged.
$DSH_HOME/.env becomes the user's ordinary environment layer. app-boot's new
loadLayeredEnv loads the invoking directory's .env then the Harness home's,
giving user < project < inherited; the home resolves from the inherited
environment first, so a project .env cannot redirect it.
Credential precedence is unchanged: the live environment still wins read-only
over the file, and shadowed writes still reject. Whether a provider-managed
store should instead win over the environment is a separate decision.
No migration: a key already in $DSH_HOME/.env keeps resolving through the new
environment layer, as a read-only env source that shadows the stored one.
`./.dsh-tmp-profile/config.json` was the web config-tree boot's user-config
plane, but never gained a writer: no production code created or edited it, no
test exercised it, and no user documentation named it. The fields it mapped
have owners elsewhere — provider/model are the api-gateway's default route and
persistenceRoot is an assembly fact, while typed user preferences live in
$DSH_HOME/settings.yaml.
Delete PROFILE_DIR, PROFILE_FILE, ProfileMapping, PROFILE_MAPPINGS, and
readProfile() with the patch source that consumed them. AppCLIEntry now
composes patches from CLI flags and the resolved frontend distIndex only; the
surrounding layers are unchanged. A file on disk is ignored completely — no
migration, replacement format, or deprecation diagnostic, per the pre-release
stance.
Yichen Jiang
Ziya
imccyu
imccyu
kingwl
ZiyaZhang
Turtle
Turtle
Tianyi Cui
_Kerman