Cui Tianyi: Claude Mods and DeepSeek Harness Reach the Same Goal via Different Paths

From Beating AI Express (Dongcha Insight), following the launch of Claude Mods, Cui Tianyi, head of the DeepSeek Harness team, noted that the approaches of the two platforms are converging. In Claude Code, Mods are essentially plugins; DeepSeek Harness, by contrast, built its entire Agent Harness on a plugin mechanism from the outset. The core difference lies in the scope of openness: Claude Code currently only exposes partial capabilities as Mods, while DeepSeek Harness has built all components—including models, tools, Skills, sessions, sandboxes, file systems, Agent Loops, orchestration, and UI—into plugins that can be freely replaced, combined, and extended. The DeepSeek Harness official team dubs this architecture "Everything is a Plugin". DeepSeek Harness’s Creator Mode also allows Agents to directly inspect the current runtime, write plugins on the fly, and save them, enabling modifications to the UI, adjustments to Agent Loops, addition of tools, and even switching of orchestration methods. Cui Tianyi joked that while this was previously called "Plugin Engineering", it might now also be referred to as "Mod Engineering".