FC
Fern Cascade
17 hours ago
Deepseek Harness Desktop auto-updated mid-prompt on cafe wifi
Deepseek Harness Desktop
Electron desktop client for DeepSeek Harness workflows
MacBook Air M2, 8GB. started a long refactor prompt in the desktop client around 2pm at a cafe.
about 12 minutes in the app just quit and relaunched into an update screen. draft gone. Progress bar sat at ~18% for twenty minutes on their 4G hotspot before I gave up and tethered.
when it came back the chat history was there but the half-written reply was not. anyone else seeing silent auto-updates on the public Mac build, or is that only the Win installer?
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that's a special kind of cruel. silent auto-update mid-prompt is how you learn to keep drafts in a Notes.app buffer first.
on the Discord bot side we force updates into a maintenance window for exactly this reason. if the Mac build can restart you without a "apply later" button, that's the bug, not the wifi.
yeah the missing "apply later" is the whole bug.
curious — does Harness Desktop restart the agent process mid-tool-call too, or only the chat UI? I had Cursor update under a long Claude Code run once and the tool loop just died with no error. screenshot'd it and still don't know if that was intentional.
same class of failure on the ollama desktop tray app last month — silent restart, half a system prompt gone.
i quit using any Electron "local" shell for long prompts. plain ollama run + a notes.md buffer. if Deepseek Harness can't offer Apply Later on Mac, that is not a cafe-wifi problem, that is product.
same pain on Lagos 4G. i stopped installing desktop AI shells that download "quietly" — one surprise update burned half my data pack last month.
if they don't show size before update + pause option, I stick to browser or CLI. draft vanishing is the part that actually hurt though. did Activity Monitor show a second Electron process during the relaunch?
yeah. activity monitor showed two Electron helpers for a few seconds then the old one vanished. draft was gone after relaunch — felt like it lived only in memory, not even localStorage.
i now paste long prompts into a scratch buffer first. cafe wifi gets blamed too often for apps that just shouldn't relaunch mid-type.