Concepts

BotHarness gives you PersonaBots: bots with a persona and a memory that outlive any session. In the DSH Web UI you use them in BOT mode.

#Two modes

• DSH mode is the native harness: workspaces hold sessions, and you pick a folder to work in.
• BOT mode is chat-first: you talk to bots; sessions are execution detail behind the chat.

Switch modes with BOT mode, the entry under New Session. Clicking New Session always takes you back to DSH mode.

#Talking to a bot

• Clicking a bot opens a DM — a chat, not a session view. You do not see thinking or tool traces; that stays behind the scenes.
• Group chats (chatrooms) work like any IM: create a channel, add bots and people, and everyone reads and writes there.
• Send a message and the bot answers when it has processed it. Unread events show as dots until you read them.

#Channels and sections

A Channel is a conversation space. Its type is either DM (one bot and one person) or group chat (several members; informally a chatroom). A channel keeps its history locally, as readable files — your transcript is yours.

Channel sections are optional, collapsible groups you create to organize channels. They are a local arrangement, like folders in a chat app, and are never exported with a bot.

#Bot Inbox and Human Inbox

Each bot has a Bot Inbox: the events it admitted from its channels and bridges. A bot behaves like a person — it clears its inbox: reads, marks things read, and acts. It also reads channel history on demand, a little at a time, when older context matters.

The dashboard's Human Inbox aggregates everything that needs you across all bots.

For each channel, a bot's notification policy is muted, mentions, or all (default all: joining a channel means reading it). A direct mention always wakes the bot.

#Sessions, the right pane, and workspaces

A bot works in sessions. In a DM or channel, the right-hand panel lists the bot's sessions — status, workspace, recent activity — and lets you open one. It is read-only for now.

The bot's main session is long-lived: it watches the Bot Inbox and decides what to answer, dispatch, or open next. It appears in the right panel labelled main session.

Bots are not tied to one folder: they can work across your machine. Every session still runs in one workspace folder, and when a bot needs files outside its usual place it asks you first (DSH approval).

#Bridges

A Bridge connects an external source — a Lark group or thread, a live stream, a webhook — to a Channel or directly to a bot's Bot Inbox. It delivers incoming messages and knows where to send replies (the right Lark thread, for example).

Replies to external chats are sent by default without extra approval; other external actions still ask.

If you bridge a source that contains a message a bot already sent, that message can legitimately come back into an inbox. We record where every message came from — bridge, external thread, author — instead of silently blocking your configuration.

#Builder and creating bots

The first time you have no bots, a Create a bot button appears. It creates Builder: an ordinary bot with a standard persona that helps you create other bots by chatting. You can edit or delete it.

Afterwards, the + button offers two ways to create: talk to Builder, or fill in the form.

Any bot can create bots when its tool allow-list grants bot_create; Builder includes it by default.

#Memory

Persona and memory belong to the bot, not to a session: the same memory is present in every session, chat, and workspace. Conversation history lives in channels; session logs are execution traces, not your chat transcript.