apaper-plugin

An academic paper-authoring toolkit for DeepSeek Harness. It bundles writing and figure skills together with the apaper-mcp paper-research MCP server, so one DSH plugin gives an agent everything it needs to search the literature, draft IEEE-style prose, and generate publication-quality figures.

What's inside

Skills (skills/)

Sourced from isomoes/skills:

Skill	Purpose
writing	Revise and strengthen academic prose; applies IEEE journal rules for journal work.
creating-figures	Publication-quality scientific figures (TikZ/CeTZ).

DeepSeek Harness plugin (dsh/)

The package exports a native Cordis plugin at @ai4paper/apaper-plugin/dsh. It registers both packaged skills and connects apaper-mcp through the Harness MCP client. The MCP process is launched on demand with npx -y @ai4paper/apaper-mcp, so no global installation is required.

Install for DeepSeek Harness

First install the package into the Harness profile you run (replace web if you use another profile):

dsh plugin --profile web add @ai4paper/apaper-plugin

Create an APaper agent preset

Installing the npm package makes it available to the selected Harness profile, but does not automatically grant it to every agent. Activate it through a user preset:

1. Open the Harness GUI and go to Settings → Agent Presets.

2. Find the shipped Standard preset and choose Copy.

3. Give the copy an ID such as apaper and a display name such as APaper. Never edit the shipped Standard preset directly.

4. Open the copied preset's agent.cordis.yml from its preset card.

5. Append this plugin row and save the file:

   - id: apaper-plugin
     name: '@ai4paper/apaper-plugin/dsh'
   

6. Create a new session and select APaper in the agent-preset selector before starting the conversation.

Ready-to-copy metadata, the Cordis fragment, and a short guide are included in dsh/preset-example/. The Cordis file there is only the APaper-specific fragment: append it to a copied Standard preset rather than using it as the complete agent.cordis.yml.

That single row activates both packaged skills and the MCP server. The model will receive the writing and creating-figures skills, plus MCP tools named mcp__apaper-mcp-v2-<instance>__<tool-name>. The small instance suffix keeps copied or updated preset generations from colliding inside one DSH process.

The npm installation and preset are profile-wide, so the same APaper preset can be used with any workspace. To limit it to one project, select APaper only for sessions opened on that project and use another preset elsewhere. Existing sessions keep the preset with which they started; changing or selecting a preset affects new sessions only.

Local checkout installation

For local development, install this checkout into the target profile instead:

dsh plugin --profile web add /absolute/path/to/apaper-plugin

Reinstall or restart the profile after changing the package code. Editing a preset composition affects newly created sessions; it does not recompose an active conversation.

Development

Run the DSH plugin tests and inspect the npm package contents with:

npm ci
npm run typecheck
npm test
npm run pack:check

Release publishing uses npm trusted publishing through GitHub OIDC. See prompt/release.md for the first manual publish and subsequent tag-release process.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.