On the day the original went offline, it picked up 117 extra stars: the successor business to a "quota-farming" plugin

dsh-connect-workbuddy is a plugin for DeepSeek Harness that plugs Tencent WorkBuddy's free credits into DeepSeek Harness. It was built in late August and stayed quiet for the first fifty days. Then in Oct 22, the top same-category project announced it was no longer maintained and taken offline. dsh-connect-workbuddy shipped new versions that same day, picked up the original's users, and grew to 1,182 stars by 11-06. The playbook for taking over is worth studying, but the space is crowded and gray, and accounts are still getting banned.

An October 20 evening, one 400

On the evening of October 20, 2026, someone reported a bug in the issue tracker of corrinehu/dsh-workbuddy-connect: requests were returning HTTP 400. Someone soon realized it wasn't a bug. WorkBuddy had started detecting and blocking third-party clients (business code 11128).

At the time, this plugin was the biggest in its category, with 1,604 stars, and it had been downloaded over fifty thousand times on npm since September. People in the community had already posted ways around the block, but the maintainer announced they would stop maintaining it, and it was taken down on day 22. A linux.do post, 'The DSH WorkBuddy Connect plugin is about to be shut down' (10-21,682 views), recorded the news. The second reply under it read: 'Yesterday I refused to give up and added disguises to my dsh workbuddy plugin, and today my account got banned 🤣.' Another followed: 'We're all in China, nobody wants trouble, better to keep a low profile.'

At the same time, another author, dingminhua, made the opposite decision. His dsh-connect-workbuddy README states it is rewritten 'with corrinehu as the main reference.' From October 20 to day 22, it went from v4.10 to v5.6 in three days, built specifically to counter this 400. On October 22 it added 117 stars in a single day, and its forks rose from 10 to 38.

What it does: use WorkBuddy's free credits inside DeepSeek Harness

DeepSeek Harness (players call it 'the big fat fish') was open-sourced on August 13 and had over 270k stars by November. It's this year's hottest agent shell. In the same period, Tencent's WorkBuddy was handing out credits generously: new users got 2,000 points, daily check-ins gave 100 points, and there was a batch of limited-time free models. Put the two together and you get a need: people who don't want to pay API fees want to use WorkBuddy's credits directly inside DeepSeek Harness.

That's exactly what this plugin does. Once installed, the WorkBuddy accounts already logged in on your machine (the China and international editions both work, and can be online at the same time) show up in DeepSeek Harness's model picker. The China edition offers GLM-5.3, DeepSeek-V4-Pro, Kimi-K3 and more; the international edition offers GPT-5.6, Gemini-3.5-Flash and more. Around 'credits' it built a whole set of features: a multi-account pool with automatic account switching, daily check-ins, claiming promotional rewards, credit-expiry reminders, per-model credit multipliers and free-model flags, queue position, and QR-code account adding.

It describes itself with restraint: 'saves you the hassle of switching back and forth between the WorkBuddy client and DSH', 'doesn't provide accounts, share credentials, or bypass billing.' But who its users are, and why they need an account pool and automatic switching, is clear to players: on linux.do, posts discussing this kind of play live in the 'freebies' section.

Where the stars came from: catching the original's people

Put the two sets of numbers side by side and the migration is obvious.

Star counts come from GitHub, 10-17 to 11-06; download counts come from npm's official stats, which have missing days and are inflated by CI and frequent upgrades (it published 100+ versions in October alone), so read only the relative changes. From 10-22 to 11-05, this repo had 66k npm downloads and the original 18k; in the first three weeks of October it was the reverse: 16k for this repo, 40k for the original.

How many of the original's users flowed to this one versus other tools can't be calculated from the outside. But the two curves went up and down on the same days, so the direction is clear.

A few other sources contribute, but they're small trickles:

• Plugin-market auto-indexing. It used the dsh-plugin and dsh-plugin-market topics, published to npm, and submitted to the plugin registry, so DeepSeek Harness's community market and five or six third-party plugin directory sites picked it up automatically. Search 'workbuddy' in DeepSeek Harness and you can install it directly.
• Freebie-hunting communities. On linux.do someone posted asking 'Will using the dsh-connect-workbuddy plugin in dsh get my account banned?' (10-28,190 views). The replies were two lines: 'This is basically a reverse proxy, there's always a chance of a ban' and 'If you're scared, don't use it.'
• Cross-referral from sibling plugins. The pinned issue #156 points people to the Trae and Qoder versions the author built separately.

No big accounts recommended it, and no media outlet has written about it; the tutorials circulating on X are about the original. There are no signs of star-buying either: forks account for about 11% of the stars, similar to peers.

What keeps people: still fixing it after getting blocked

The original's selling point was 'zero configuration.' Once the upstream tightened up, 'zero configuration' meant nothing, and users only wanted one thing: does it still work?

From October 21 to day 29, dsh-connect-workbuddy shipped releases back-to-back with workarounds: it rewrote the fixed client fingerprint in requests, swapped in neutral request headers, added three-tier retry rescue, and set up a China-based backup gateway. More useful was its issue tracker: the pinned thread sorts the various 400 and 403 and provides a report template. On October 26, someone opened an issue, 'The international edition has started banning accounts', and the author replied at length, explaining that 11128 (channel verification, a retry gets through) and 11140 (account restricted, neither retry nor switching helps) are different things, what the plugin does in each case, and how accounts get back into the pool.

For a group who had just lost access, that kind of response, 'I know what happened and I'm fixing it', meant more than any feature list.

Who it's competing with

This need has already spawned a whole cluster of projects on GitHub, most with more stars than this one:

Its position: in the 'native DeepSeek Harness plugin, one-click install' slot, it is the biggest now that the original is gone. Outside that slot, both the reverse-proxy gateways and the no-login plugins are bigger.

Risk: the platform is banning accounts

The first paragraph of the README is a risk warning: 'WorkBuddy has begun restricting requests from unofficial clients. This project does not guarantee long-term availability of these interfaces... Using the official WorkBuddy client is always the safest choice.'

In the issue tracker: 10-26 'The international edition has started banning accounts', 10-30 'Things are bad with the international edition', and the same day 'The China edition got banned, I was on v5.15.0': 'Just upgraded to v5.15.0 and got banned not long after.' The top reply: 'Better to just use the official one. Every time they update, the plugin breaks. Not enough hassle already?'

It's still growing, +7 stars in the last 330 days, but slower than the +7 of the first 419 days. How long this business lasts is in Tencent's hands.

If it were you

C There's something to learn, but following it isn't worth much. Building another WorkBuddy plugin: the lane already has a dozen-plus projects with over a thousand stars, the platform is banning accounts, and that migration of the original's users has already been captured. Its stars came from a one-time 'top project exits' moment you can't replicate.

Who it's for Developers who want stars for their own open-source project and are willing to maintain a tool that depends on an upstream over the long term. What to learn is its succession play and maintenance approach, not its topic.

Who it's not for Anyone wanting to build another tool that exploits big companies' free quotas (it's gray for the platform, users get banned, and worse, there's legal risk; a linux.do user already warned 'watch out for the crime of destroying computer systems'), and anyone hoping to make money from it (it's open-source under MIT, the author charges nothing, and there's nowhere to charge).

How to do it Watch an open-source project with a clear need whose lead maintainer may walk away: the upstream is tightening its interfaces, the author's bandwidth is visibly stretched, or the issue tracker is full of unanswered questions. Prepare a compatible rewrite in advance and credit the original generously in the README. The day they stop, ship a release to take over. Choose a topic on the compliant side: plugins for new platforms (like DeepSeek Harness, which went viral right after open-sourcing), wrappers around official open APIs, or filling in upstream features, not getting around platform risk controls.

How to get users Early on a new platform, plugin markets and directory sites mostly index by topic and registry, so getting topics right, publishing to npm, and submitting to the registry gives you a built-in stream of traffic. When the original fell apart, go to its issue tracker or related forum threads and say 'this still works here.' Then put categorized error codes and exact version-install instructions into the README and a pinned issue. The messier the upstream gets, the more these keep people around.

什么时候之前 接班窗口只有头部退场后的一两天:它 10-22 一天拿了 117 星,10-23 还有 +99,之后回到每天 50 到 70 颗。所以要提前准备好,等的是那一天,而不是那一天再开始写(推断)。

What would mean you read it wrong (1) The WorkBuddy bans don't spread, and within a month it doubles again to over two thousand stars: that would mean this gray need lasts longer than judged, and the succession topic is worth doing. (2) Tencent officially opens WorkBuddy to third-party clients: the plugin becomes compliant and its value in this slot goes up. (3) Someone uses the same succession play on another new platform (not DeepSeek Harness) and gets over a thousand stars within a week: that would mean the play is replicable at scale, worth moving up a tier.