moving-target

A DeepSeek Harness (DSH) plugin that
gives every new agent session a one-paragraph project goal — distilled from your own
session history, frozen until you choose to update it.

What it does

Project context lives between two extremes:

• No memory — the agent re-deduces the project's purpose from the code every session.
  Cheap to maintain, slow to start.
• Everything documented — specs and history files in the repo. Fast to start, but they
  go stale, and every stale idea contaminates every future session's context.

moving-target is the lightweight middle ground: a single ~10,000-foot overview of what the
project is about, written once, injected into every new session, and updated only when
you say so.

• moving-target-bootstrap — run once per project. It extracts the first prompt you
  sent to every past session in the workspace (a deterministic scan of the DSH session
  store — no LLM in the extraction itself) and has the agent distill them into one goal
  paragraph, saved to .moving-target/summary.md in the repo.
• From then on, every new session starts with that paragraph already injected — before
  your first prompt. Resumed sessions and un-bootstrapped projects are untouched.
• moving-target-update — refreshes the summary from the current session only. The
  goal moves as a project evolves; you decide when the frozen overview follows it. The
  current summary is injected into the update prompt; the agent never edits the file
  behind your back.

Not bootstrapped? Nothing happens — zero overhead.

Why it exists

AGENTS.md-style goal statements rot because the goal is a moving target, and nothing
marks the moment it moved. The truest record of what a project is about is the first
thing you said about it, every time you started a session. moving-target turns that
record into context that stays fresh on your terms.

Install

Plugins install per-profile. From this repo:

npm pack
dsh plugin --profile <your-profile> add file:/path/to/moving-target-0.1.0.tgz

Mount it by adding an insert row to the profile's cordis.patch.yml:

- insert:
    - id: moving-target
      name: moving-target

Quick start

/moving-target-bootstrap     # once per project; re-runnable, overwrites

Then do nothing — new sessions pick up the summary automatically. When a session changes
or expands the project's frontier:

/moving-target-update        # refresh the summary from this session

The standalone extractor also works without the plugin:

npx moving-target-extract /path/to/workspace
# 2026-08-22 20:19 /myproject Here, in this folder, I want to implement…

.gitignore guidance

.moving-target/ is personal context distilled from your session history — ignore it
by default:

.moving-target/

Commit it deliberately only if the team agrees the summary should be shared (and
re-bootstrapped collectively).

Requirements

• Node ≥ 22.6 (type-stripping) and the zstd binary on PATH.
• Sessions are read-only to moving-target; it never writes to the DSH store.

Caveats

• The summary is a snapshot; refresh it deliberately (bootstrap or update).
• Subagent sessions are excluded; only sessions whose first message came from a human
  count.
• The injected summary is model-facing context — visible in transcripts, not a substitute
  for a real prompt.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.