modelstudioai Desktop Development Harness
Overview
Use this skill to turn desktop work into a tight harness loop: gather runtime context, reproduce with the UI and logs visible to the agent, make the smallest fix, verify through the same path, and encode any missing affordance back into the repo.
Read references/harness-principles.md when the task changes the development
workflow, observability, docs, tests, or agent-facing harness itself.
Quick Context
For bug reports, UI failures, hangs, startup problems, messaging issues, or anything involving the running desktop app, inspect the runtime logs directly. Important paths on macOS:
~/Library/Logs/com.alibaba.openwork/desktop-runtime.log~/.qwen/for Qwen runtime state and transcripts
Search logs before guessing:
rg -n "error|warn|failed|exception|crash|Unhandled|rejection" \
"$HOME/Library/Logs/com.alibaba.openwork/desktop-runtime.log"
Harness Loop
- Map the surface. Identify whether the task touches Tauri Rust, bootstrap assets, Web Shell, bundled runtime, channels, or the browser child webview. Read nearby code and tests before editing.
- Collect live evidence. Read and tail the relevant log while reproducing. Treat missing or ambiguous logs as part of the bug.
- Drive the UI. Inspect the daemon-served Web Shell in a browser for DOM, accessibility, console, and network evidence; verify native behavior in the Tauri app and runtime log.
- Reproduce first. For bugs, capture the exact observed behavior and the evidence that proves it. If reproduction differs from the user's report, compare environment, app state, build artifact, account, timing, and logs.
- Patch narrowly. Keep changes scoped to the proven cause. Add structure only when it removes real repeated work or makes the app more readable to future agents.
- Verify through the same path. Re-run the reproduction, inspect logs and DevTools again, then run focused tests/typechecks for touched packages.
- Improve the harness when needed. If the fix required hidden knowledge, add a small doc, test, log field, or skill update so the next agent can see it directly.
Running Desktop
Use desktop-specific commands from packages/desktop-shell:
cd packages/desktop-shell
npm install --workspaces=false
npm run build:runtime --workspaces=false
npm run dev --workspaces=false
Reuse the prepared runtime on later runs. Set
OPENWORK_DESKTOP_WORKSPACE=/absolute/path for an isolated workspace.
Web Shell inspection
Run npm run smoke:runtime --workspaces=false to launch and probe the bundled
loopback runtime. Use npm run dev --workspaces=false for native behavior; do
not substitute the retired Electron renderer.
Focused Verification
Choose the narrowest checks that cover the touched surface:
cd packages/desktop-shell && npm test --workspaces=false
cd packages/desktop-shell && npm run test:migration --workspaces=false
cd packages/desktop-shell && npm run test:release --workspaces=false
cd packages/desktop-shell && npm run smoke:runtime --workspaces=false
npm run typecheck --workspace=packages/web-shell
For root CLI/core changes, use the root repository commands from AGENTS.md
instead. For desktop-only changes, prefer desktop package commands first.
Agent-Readable Changes
Favor changes that future agents can inspect and verify:
- Add structured log fields near failure boundaries instead of vague messages.
- Add accessible names or stable UI affordances when DevTools snapshots are hard to interpret.
- Keep docs as maps with links to deeper sources. Do not create giant manuals.
- Convert repeated manual debugging steps into docs, tests, or structured logs.
- Record non-trivial investigation notes in
.qwen/investigations/.
Stop and ask the user only when the missing input cannot be discovered locally and a reasonable assumption would risk changing the wrong behavior.