dsh-migrate

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Import chat history and memory from other AI agents into DeepSeek Harness.

Switching harnesses should not mean losing your context. dsh-migrate reads the transcripts and memory stores other agents leave on disk and writes them as native DeepSeek Harness session logs — searchable, inspectable in the Trajectory view, and resumable (--fork-style continue) as if they had been recorded by DSH itself.

It works two ways: a /migrate slash command inside DSH, and a standalone CLI (npx @ersss/dsh-migrate) that scans the whole machine and previews with a dry run before writing anything.

Supported sources

Every adapter is tolerant: malformed lines and unknown row types are skipped, never fatal. Missing fields degrade gracefully (unknown model → imported, unknown cwd → the _no-cwd project).

Install

# 1. Install the plugin into your DSH web profile
dsh plugin --profile web add @ersss/dsh-migrate

# 2. Restart DSH
dsh web

The package declares a dsh.bundle patch layer, so installing it does two things at once:

• registers the /migrate slash command, and
• points DSH's session store at $DSH_HOME/sessions-imported in raw-JSONL mode — a dedicated root for imported logs that never mixes with the default store's encoding.

Heads-up: the bundled patch relocates the default session root, which means sessions you recorded before installing the plugin stay in the old sessions/ root and stop being listed. If you have existing DSH sessions you still want listed, either merge the patch's two rows into $DSH_HOME/profiles/web/cordis.patch.yml and keep both roots by alternating --patch, or simply run the CLI with --out pointed at your live root (raw JSONL reads fine under a zstd root only if the root was created with compression: 'none'). Fresh installs are unaffected.

Use

From inside DSH (Web UI, TUI, headless):

/migrate list                 # show what each agent has on disk
/migrate run                  # import everything
/migrate run --source claude-code --limit 10

From a terminal, without DSH running (also the right choice for big archives):

npx @ersss/dsh-migrate list
npx @ersss/dsh-migrate run                       # → $DSH_HOME/sessions-imported
npx @ersss/dsh-migrate run --out /path/to/root   # anywhere you like
npx @ersss/dsh-migrate run --write-instructions .  # also fold memory into ./AGENTS.md

Imported sessions appear in the sidebar grouped by their original project directory, and in the Trajectory view with their full event stream — prompts, reasoning, tool calls, and results.

What gets written

DSH's session log is an append-only JSONL event stream (SESSION_FORMAT_VERSION 0). For every source session, dsh-migrate writes one log:

$DSH_HOME/sessions-imported/--<project>--/<id>/session.jsonl

  {"type":"session","version":0,"id":"…","createdAt":…,"delegationDepth":0,"cwd":"…"}
  {"type":"turn/start","seq":0,"time":…,"data":{"turn":1}}
  {"type":"user/message","seq":1,…,"data":{"role":"user","source":{"kind":"user","via":"dsh-migrate:claude-code"},"content":[{"type":"text","text":"…"}]},"surfaceOp":"append"}
  {"type":"step/start",…} {"type":"assistant/message",…} {"type":"tool/call",…} {"type":"tool/result",…} {"type":"step/end",…}
  {"type":"turn/end",…,"data":{"turn":1,"reason":{"kind":"completed"}}}
  …
  {"type":"session/end-seed",…}        ← marks the log as imported seed history

Mapping decisions, briefly:

• Turns. One source user prompt (plus the assistant work it triggered) becomes one turn/start…turn/end bracket. Tool-result-only user rows (Claude Code, Cline) attach to the pending tool/call instead of opening a turn.
• Messages. User and system text become user/message events; assistant text/reasoning/tool-calls become one assistant/message per step; tool results become tool/result paired by call id.
• Provenance, not impersonation. Imported assistant messages keep the original provider and model (provider: "dsh-migrate:anthropic", model: "claude-fable-5"). Imported user messages are kind: "user" — required for the trajectory view and history derivation — with the importer declared on the merge-extensible via channel (via: "dsh-migrate:claude-code").
• Timestamps and ids. Original timestamps are preserved when the source records them (monotonicity enforced); missing call ids get fresh UUIDs; session ids are fresh UUIDs (never the source's) so an import can never shadow a live session. The header carries importedSource / importedSourceId, so imported sessions are filterable without walking the event stream.
• Memory. Each source's memory records become one "Imported memory" session (readable, searchable, resumable), and --write-instructions <project> additionally folds them into that project's AGENTS.md between <!-- dsh-migrate … --> markers (idempotent re-runs).
• Append-only honesty. Writes use wx (no overwrite). A colliding id is retried with a fresh one; existing logs are never modified.

How resume works

The trailing session/end-seed event makes the whole imported log seed history: when you continue an imported session, DSH replays the log as inherited context, then starts a clean live segment — the model sees the prior conversation exactly as DSH would have logged it. The agent preset and tools of the current runtime apply; tools the old agent had and DSH does not simply become history.

Notes & limitations

• Read-only on sources. The importer never writes to the source agents' directories.
• Images and attachments are not imported (DSH attachments are content-addressed host objects); their surrounding text is.
• Compaction history in source transcripts is flattened to plain messages.
• Source-specific gaps, by design of the source format: Cursor transcripts don't record tool results (calls import without results); ChatGPT exports have no structured tool calls (tool messages become text); Kimi CLI sub-agent internals mirrored as SubagentEvent are skipped (import subagents/<id>/wire.jsonl directly if you want them).
• SQLite sources are read immutably (mode=ro&immutable=1), so a running Hermes/OpenClaw gateway is never disturbed. OpenClaw imports every session_window; resets/rollover windows appear as separate sessions (they were separate transcripts upstream too).
• Aider scan roots are $DSH_MIGRATE_SCAN (path-list), ~/projects, ~/code, ~/dev, ~/work, and a shallow $HOME sweep — its history files live inside projects, so a fixed home-relative path cannot find them.
• Format drift: these layouts are undocumented internals of the source agents and change over time. Adapters skip what they do not recognise; if your agent version is newer, please open an issue with a (redacted) sample row.

Development

npm install
npm run build      # tsc → dist/
npm test           # fixture-driven end-to-end tests (real DSH codec replay)

The test suite replays produced logs through the actual @deepseek-ai/dsh-session codec (decodeStorageRecord + foldSurface) vendored from a live DSH profile, so format regressions fail loudly.

Contributing a source adapter

One adapter = one file in src/formats/ implementing:

interface SourceAdapter {
  key: string
  label: string
  detect(home: string): Promise<DiscoveredSource | undefined>
  readSessions(home: string, options?: { limit?: number }): Promise<IrSession[]>
  readMemories(home: string): Promise<IrMemory[]>
}

Register it in src/formats/index.ts and add a fixture test. See src/formats/claude-code.ts for the reference implementation.

License

MIT