Getting started
Introduction
Baby Whale is a local AI coworker for knowledge work. Give it messy source material and a plain-language brief; it reads the files, writes the code, and delivers finished spreadsheets, presentations, and documents — on your machine.
What Baby Whale does
Baby Whale is the knowledge-work personality of DeepSeek Harness, an open-source agent harness where everything is a plugin. In the Coworker preset it ships with a complete office toolkit:
- Creates real office files. Excel workbooks with live formulas and native charts, PowerPoint decks with proper layouts and speaker notes, and Word documents with covers, callouts, and banded tables.
- Reads what you upload. Drop any
.xlsx,.csv, or.docxinto the chat; it lands in the session workspace and gets analyzed. - Works on a schedule. Recurring tasks run on a live task board, and missed runs are surfaced honestly rather than dropped silently.
- Stays local. No Baby Whale account, no cloud storage, no telemetry. Your files stay on your disk, and the model answers to your own API key.
How a session goes
A typical run looks like this: you open a workspace, describe the outcome in plain
language, and attach the source material. Baby Whale reads the data, plans the work,
writes a Python script using openpyxl, python-pptx, or python-docx, verifies the result,
and saves the files under deliverables/. You open them like any other file —
because they are any other file.
Public preview. Baby Whale is moving quickly and may make breaking changes between releases. Pin a version if you depend on it, and expect an honest changelog.
Core concepts
| Concept | What it means |
|---|---|
| Workspace | A local folder bound to a session. Uploads, scripts, and deliverables live here. |
| Coworker mode | The preset that turns DeepSeek Harness into an office coworker — skills and office tools included. |
| Skill | A focused plugin, like excel-analysis or office-design-system. Skills are toggleable in Settings → Skills. |
| Deliverables | The finished files Baby Whale writes to deliverables/ in your workspace. |
| Provider | The LLM you connect with your own API key — DeepSeek, OpenRouter, or any compatible endpoint. |
Where to go next
- New here? Start with Installation — you only need Node.js and an API key.
- Want to see the office toolkit in detail? Read Office deliverables.
- Something not working? Check Changelog Troubleshooting.