One person and AI shipped 13 versions in four weeks: DeepSeekBot hit 643 stars, and a near-identical rival launched three weeks later 5,714

DeepSeekBot (renamed to Tobs in late October; Chinese name 托布) is a plugin for DeepSeek Harness that lets you raise a set of named Bots with personalities, whose memory lives in Git. They can join group chats, take assignments, run scheduled tasks, and use their own identities on Feishu, WeChat, QQ, Slack and Discord. It reached 643 stars in 51 days since creation and gains twenty to thirty stars a day, which is not small. But DS Bot, which occupies the same spot and launched three weeks later, has 9 times its stars. This piece looks at where its stars came from, why it couldn't outrun the rival, and whether building a Bot plugin on DeepSeek Harness is still worth it today.

Oct 25, it changed its name

In 2026 October 25, BotHarness shipped version 1.5.1. The npm package for installing the plugin changed from deepseekbot to @botharness/tobs, and the project was renamed Tobs. The old package stays as a compatibility entry point, and the README gained a FAQ section titled "Which DeepSeek Bot project is this?" with a table: on one side itself, on the other Fei2411's DS Bot (npm ds-bot), comparing everything from memory format and licensing to "what it can do outside DSH." The closing line reads: "Both are open source, read both codebases."

The author wrote a dedicated section saying "we're not that one" because many people really did confuse them. Several Chinese-language posts on X promoting "DeepSeek Bot" (one from @NFT_Chen with about 25k views, one from @aigclink with 8.6k) were in fact promoting DS Bot. Searching "DeepSeekBot" on GitHub, this repo shows up first. The name collision brought it traffic but also kept it living in someone else's shadow. Whether the rename was driven by trademark pressure or a deliberate choice to separate from the rival is not visible from outside and is unverified.

What it is

It was built by DoodleBear (@DoodleBear_Kuma on X), who holds a computer science bachelor's from Fu Jen Catholic University in Taiwan and is pursuing a master's at the University of Tsukuba in Japan, with 95 followers on GitHub. The repo was created in Sep 16, and the first release came in Oct 5 1.0.

The product pitch is "an open-source GrokBot alternative." xAI launched Grok Bot in Aug 11, a feature in the form of an "AI coworker," where each Bot gets a cloud computer, available only to top-tier users such as SuperGrok Heavy subscribers. DeepSeekBot brings that experience local, free, with model choice, inside DeepSeek Harness (DSH below), which adds a "Bot mode" to the sidebar.

Its two biggest differences from comparable products:

• Memory is a Git repo. Each Bot has its own worktree, so what it remembers can be diffed and rolled back, and pushing to GitHub shares memory across several computers. In the README screenshots, a Bot named Mira shows every memory commit and branch in its right sidebar.
• Bots use their own identities in IM. @ it in a Feishu group and it replies from its own account in place. In WeChat direct messages it can also send and receive files. For Chinese users this is far more practical than "chatting in the DSH window."

Where the stars came from

Look at the curve first. It reached 116 stars in October 17 and has added 15 to 50 stars a day ever since, with no single day of explosive growth. November's 49 stars in 3 was its highest day. Over the last 7 days it gained +255, and over the first 7 days +155, so it is still accelerating (GitHub, 11-06). It has never made GitHub's trending list, and no major account has written about it specifically.

The boosts I could find, ranked by size:

Over the last 30 days, the two npm packages combined got about 8,900 downloads (npm, as of 11-05). DS Bot has 36k. Downloads include automatic updates, so they don't equal the number of installs.

Another number worth knowing: the repo has over 300 open issues, which looks busy, but 1,630 of them were opened by the author. The most active external opener has only 14. Commit history, apart from the author (3,388 commits), is mostly "claude" (295 commits) and "codex" (1 commits). This is one person writing code with AI and using issues as a task queue. From Oct 5 to Nov 2 it shipped 13 versions, roughly one every two or three days: scheduled tasks, window companions, a Bot marketplace, phone pairing, Tobs Connect, and cross-computer private chat between Bots. Its product completeness is high among DSH plugins, but that completeness didn't convert into stars.

Why the rival three weeks behind pulled ahead

The two projects do the same thing, and the difference comes down to two things.

First, onboarding. DS Bot's approach is to turn DSH itself into a Bot chat app. A main Bot named Chief walks you through building a team in conversation. In groups, only the admin Bot responds by default to save tokens, and there is a usage page. Users know right away what to do and how much it will cost. DeepSeekBot's Git memory, IM identities and Bot network are all stronger, but they are the kind of things you appreciate only after using it for a while.

Second, who spoke for it first. DS Bot was quickly promoted by Chinese KOLs after launch, gaining up to 400 stars in a single day (10-24). DeepSeekBot never had a day like that. When a plugin ecosystem has just exploded and everyone is looking for a "big plugin that works right after install," the first one pushed by a big account takes most of the attention. Later entrants, however good, only get the spillover.

DS Bot itself is slowing down: over the last 7 days it gained +1,202, less than the +1,489 over the first 7 days. Interest in this category may have already peaked (inferred).

Who's following

Beyond DS Bot, the same spot has a whole string of others:

• DSH Bot team plugins that appeared after October 25: aibot-fans/dsh-bot, 8kugames/dsh-team-bots, lisongjianustc/dsh-bot and others, each at 0 to 35 stars.
• Independent "Grok Bot alternatives" that don't depend on DSH: OpenMausBot 13k stars, +5,817 in the last 7 days; each bot gets its own VM and can connect 1,700 multiple apps. Chinese dev 杨小乱 11-05 posted one tweet that got 228k views. rakazo 7,167 stars; AnyModelBot only just created its repo and already has 2,709 stars, gaining up to 1,145 in a single day (10-27). On Product Hunt, OpenBot got 296 votes.

Under the "Grok Bot alternative" label, stars are flowing toward standalone apps, while the DSH plugin path already has two early arrivals and a string of later ones.

If it were you

In one line: don't enter this spot again. What's worth learning is how it caught the timing, and why it lost.

• Who it suits: fast developers who can ship a version every two or three days with AI alone, waiting for the next big platform that opens plugins.
• Who it doesn't suit: anyone who wants to build another "Bot team" plugin on DSH. DS Bot has 5,714 stars and a head start, and a dozen or so later entrants are all below 35 stars. You would be the Nth.
• How to do it: the next time a platform opens plugins (or a closed-source hit launches, available only to paying users), move that hit in within two weeks and claim the name "platform + hit name" directly. At the start, do just one thing: make it so people can install and understand it in five minutes. Deep features like Git memory and cross-machine sync come later. If you want to differentiate inside the current category, pick a layer that none of them does well and build that alone, for example only "Bots using their own identity in Feishu / WeChat groups," packaged as an independent library any Bot framework can plug into.
• How to get stars: on launch day you need someone to speak for you. In the Chinese circle that means X and Bilibili accounts that focus on AI tools. Give them something demoable in advance. Product Hunt is basically useless for this kind of developer tool (DS Bot got 1 votes). If you collide with an existing name, write a comparison table like this one; some of the rival's traffic will flow back through your comparison page.
• When to move: the window for this DSH wave has largely closed. Your time is the two to three weeks after the next platform event. DS Bot launching three weeks later and still winning shows that who gets pushed in the first month matters more than who launches first.
• What would mean you read it wrong: if DeepSeekBot, through IM identities and Git memory, overtakes DS Bot's weekly star gains over the next month (currently 255 versus 1,202), that shows "going deep first" can still catch up, and the read was wrong. If the weekly growth of the official DSH repo accelerates again, there is another wave of plugin opportunity in this ecosystem.