Pooling five WorkBuddy accounts into one model pool: how dsh-xdpool's 435 stars were earned day by day

After DeepSeek Harness (DSH) went open source, a big wave of "plug free quota from other vendors into DSH" plugins showed up. dsh-xdpool is one of them. It pools every account ever logged into the WorkBuddy desktop app into one pool, and it also checks in for you and completes tasks to earn points in the background. Two months in, it has 435 stars, adding ten to twenty a day. Growth has been steady, never a spike. Below: where its stars come from, why this space is so crowded, and what you can and shouldn't copy if you want to build an open-source project that earns stars.

A 11128 error

One night in Oct 2026 20, a user opened issue #59 on the dsh-xdpool repo. The title was just five words: "workbuddy updated, detection triggered." He pasted an error: HTTP 400, business code 11128, Illegal API invocation from an unapproved channel, and the message said the call failed channel verification and might not have come from the official client.

The meaning is clear: Tencent has started checking whether requests come from its own client, and DSH isn't one, so it's rejected outright. Someone underneath replied, "ourfreemodel is down too, this one works better than ourfreemodel." The original poster added: "I topped up 10 yuan, had DeepSeek fix it itself, and it cost about 2 yuan to sort out."

What the project is, who uses it, and where the risk lies are all in that one issue. The users hold several WorkBuddy accounts, are willing to read error messages and edit code to keep the free quota flowing, and the platform can change its rules at any time. From 10-16 to 10-27, the repo kept accumulating #42, #43, #46, #48, #58, #77, #79, all 11128, most with the missing request headers users themselves captured and traced.

What it is

A DSH plugin (npm package dsh-xdpool, TypeScript, MIT). The first line of the README: "Plug all the free model quota you can get into one shared model pool in DSH."

It started with one job: every account logged into the WorkBuddy desktop app is automatically discovered, saved, and added to the pool. When an account gets rate-limited (429) or runs out of points, requests switch to the next usable account. There's also a sticky mode that pins a conversation to one account, so switching accounts doesn't wipe the upstream cache.

Over time it grew into six pages: the account pool, QR-code login for thirteen vendors, aggregation of 76 free-quota sources, a usage dashboard, model routing, and a local OpenAI-compatible gateway. It also ships a full set of "points automation": daily check-ins, activity reporting, task reward claims, streak redemptions, and dispatching "Cat Travel." The task rewards alone cover 13 tasks, such as "swap to the Peacekeeper Elite theme" or "summon an expert 5 times." The README says a test run across four accounts collected 3300 points plus 135 energy.

The author is XDTrees, whose GitHub account has only this one repo. The repo was created in Sep 4, originally named dsh-workbuddy-xdpool. In mid-October it was renamed to the current name, and its scope widened from WorkBuddy to "every free quota you can take."

How well it's growing

The curve is a straight slope with no sudden jumps. That shape usually means the stars didn't come from a single tweet or a spike on a trending list. They came from people who installed it and slowly starred it over time. npm downloads include version bumps and mirror duplicates, so they don't equal users.

Where the stars came from

First, the DSH platform. DeepSeek open-sourced DSH in Aug 13. It now has 274k stars, and @deepseek-ai/dsh has had 30M npm downloads in the last 2.21 days. In DSH, model sources are plugins too, so "plug in free quota" suddenly became a must-have category. The Chinese-speaking community already has tons of "WorkBuddy freeloading guides" (Tencent Cloud developer community, Zhihu, Smzdm, Bilibili), and those readers want to use that quota inside DSH.

Second, plugin directories. dsh.so, dsh.deepseek404.com, googleharness.com, and the Bilibili DSH plugin store all list it. Searching "DSH WorkBuddy" finds it. It has not made it into the community list awesome-dsh-plugin.

Third, the "Star" button inside the plugin. This is the move most worth studying. The plugin card has "Star" and "Community group" buttons in the top right. The top of the README isn't an intro; it's "Join the group first": a WeChat bot QR code (send "XD" to get added) and a QQ group. Points automation makes users open the card every day, so they see that button every day. The steady star curve most likely comes from exactly this (inference).

Fourth, catching users of the leading plugin. The README opens by comparing itself with dsh-workbuddy-connect: "That kind of plugin handles one account at a time." The acknowledgments credit two versions, one from corrinehu and one from dingminhua. The corrinehu version peaked at 1,604 stars, and after 10-21 the repo became inaccessible, for reasons outsiders can't see. In those days xdpool gained 12 to 27 stars a day, while most of the users who left the other repo went to the dingminhua version.

Fifth, one article. On Oct 16, an article on OSChina titled "Where account-pool plugins stand" called xdpool "one of the more representative plugins in this category." Who wrote it hasn't been verified.

It can't be found on X over the past two months. What spread was the three-step dsh-workbuddy-connect tutorial. No media outlet has written about it.

Why it's only 435, not 40k

This space is too crowded, and every item in it has something bigger:

Most of these projects appeared in a cluster from August to mid-September, before xdpool. Its position is "everything in one install inside DSH": multi-account on by default, automated tasks, aggregated free channels. That explains why it has a loyal core. You can see it in the issues: someone running 5 accounts captured the request parameters for a newly released "Try XX Expert" task and posted them (#98). It also shows why it hasn't grown bigger: most people want free and hassle-free, not to manage a pile of sock-puppet accounts.

There's a harder ceiling too. WorkBuddy's subscription policy explicitly bans obtaining improper rewards through bulk sign-ups or account sharing, and the plugin relies on non-public client APIs. The string of October 11128 shows the platform is tightening up, and the next crackdown may not be fixable.

If it were you

The bottom line: Building another WorkBuddy account pool or DSH freeloading plugin won't earn many stars. What's worth copying is the setup that lets stars keep growing on their own.

Who it suits: Solo developers who already write plugins for a new platform (an agent framework like DSH, or an editor plugin ecosystem) and want their project's stars to climb steadily.

Who it doesn't suit: Anyone aiming to fight head-on in the "free quota / account pool" slot (the leader has 60k stars, there are plenty of single-purpose tools, and forks keep appearing); anyone who can't stand upstream APIs changing every day and needing a fix three times a week; anyone who cares about compliance and doesn't want a "bulk points farming" project on their GitHub profile.

How to do it: Three things you can take directly. One, build a feature users need to open every day (check-ins, daily digests, quota alerts), then put the "Star" and "Community group" buttons in the plugin UI itself, not only in the README. Two, compare yourself line by line against the leading project on the first screen of the README, stating in one sentence "they handle one at a time, I handle many by default," to catch people searching for the leader. Three, bundle scattered single-purpose tools into one all-in-one plugin, but choose a direction the platform is unlikely to shut down: legitimate free quota (public free tiers, local models), usage dashboards, model routing. Those pages in xdpool are the durable part.

How to get stars: Get listed in the platform's plugin directories and community lists (xdpool is missing from awesome-dsh-plugin, which is a gap it left open). Set up a group and keep heavy users around. They'll write issues, capture requests, and suggest fixes for you. Ship updates the same day the platform does, since directory rankings favor downloads and activity.

When to do it: DSH is still growing (xdpool gained stars in the past month), so this playbook still works on DSH. For the next newly open-sourced platform, the first two or three weeks are the most effective window. Don't enter the WorkBuddy track now. Given how the platform is tightening, its window is measured in weeks.

What would show you read it wrong: (1) xdpool keeps gaining stars at a steady pace after verification steps like 11128 and even outpaces the dingminhua version, which would mean the multi-account crowd is bigger than expected and the account-pool slot still has room; (2) Tencent fully blocks unofficial clients, and xdpool and its peers stall together, which would mean projects built on platform loopholes lose their star count to zero, and the effect of the "Star button" can't even be measured anymore; (3) someone reaches a thousand stars in a month on DSH using only clean free-tier aggregation (no sock puppets), which would mean this slot can be done without the gray-area part.

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Data and sources: GitHub repo page, README, and daily star records (10-17 to 11-06); repo issues #42, #59 (10-20), #98 (10-29); npm download stats (11-06); dsh.so plugin page (11-06); OSChina 2026-10-16 article; WorkBuddy subscription policy page; X search (past 60 days). npm downloads include version bumps and mirror duplicates. "The Star button drives the steady growth" is an inference from the shape of the curve.