Master's #1369 deleted the TUI, the meta and upgrade subcommands, and the
whole-tree --config-replace path. These notes were written before that landed
and still promised a flag the CLI no longer registers, and named it as the
lever a deployment uses to pin a field against a user's stored settings —
which now has no CLI equivalent at all.
State what shipped: every booting surface takes --config, dsh -p is the
surface this change actually gave it to, and a deployment that must win
against stored settings ships its own bin or loader tree. Each note
cross-links #1369's own note rather than restating the removal, and the
shared-base note moves its --config-replace sentences to past tense.
$DSH_HOME/config.yaml was an implicit composition layer: if the file existed,
every launch applied an arbitrary Loader patch graph over the shipped tree,
kept live by a dedicated HMR watcher. Three costs came from the implicitness,
not the capability. A patch replaces its target row's whole config, so a file
written months ago pins that row to the field set it knew and every default
the shipped tree later adds silently stops applying. It competed with the
typed settings namespaces llm-deepseek and llm-pi-ai already register, so
which one wins was a function of layer order rather than meaning. And the
explicit escape hatch it was supposedly redundant with did not exist on every
surface: dsh -p, dsh meta, and dsh upgrade all rejected --config, so for them
the implicit file was the only composition route at all.
Complete the explicit layer first: --config and --config-replace now work on
every booting surface. A headless --config-replace tree must still mount a
webserver row, because that surface reaches its own agent over the same HTTP
gateway the browser uses; AppCLIEntry names that contract in the failure
instead of reporting a bare missing service.
Then delete the implicit one. PERSONAL_CONFIG_FILENAME, loadPersonalPatches,
watchPersonalPatches, and the config-only HMR row mounted for it are gone; a
file left at that path is inert, and --dump-config no longer reads the Harness
home. --config therefore stops *replacing* the personal overlay and simply
*is* the user overlay.
No migration: a user who wants the old behavior names the same file
(dsh --config ~/.dsh/config.yaml), which a shell alias makes permanent.
Yichen Jiang