dsh-ask-user-timeout

When the model calls ask_user_question in DeepSeek Harness, the agent loop parks until a human answers in the Web UI. That rendering is exclusively handled by the live browser composer takeover. If no tab is actively displaying the session—closed, backgrounded overnight, or the mux connection dropped—nothing renders the question and nothing ever times it out. The turn stays marked "in progress" indefinitely, and the only escape is a manual stop that surfaces a misleading ASK_ABORTED even though the question was never shown to anyone.

dsh-ask-user-timeout is a narrow guard for exactly this gap. It reuses the same deadline() primitive the official timeout-policy guard relies on, injecting a cooperative deadline (default 10 minutes) around ask_user_question execution. When the deadline wins, the tool returns a structured ASK_TIMEOUT result instead of hanging, allowing the loop to proceed and the model to re-ask or move on. The wrapper hooks into the tools/execute extension point, targets only ask_user_question by name, delegates every other tool unchanged, and modifies neither the tool schema, output shape, nor semantics.

If you run Harness in environments where a browser tab is not guaranteed to stay connected—background or headless tasks, overnight sessions, flaky remote links—or simply want a safety net so a single unanswered question cannot lock the agent loop forever, this plugin is the minimal guard designed for that job.