When your AI says atbridge.ai is broken

In short: if your AI claims an atbridge.ai tool is broken, or quietly builds something a different way and calls the task done, it is almost always a local or out-of-date issue — not a fault in the product. Run atbridge update, restart the AI app, and ask it to try again.

Why this happens

A tool error, or an AI saying a feature “isn’t supported”, nearly always points to a local or temporary problem rather than a fault in atbridge itself. The usual causes are:

• an out-of-date atbridge app,
• an AI client that hasn’t reloaded its tools since the last update, or
• Thunderbird not running.

Updating atbridge and restarting the AI app clears it in nearly every case.

The fix

atbridge update

(or atbridge check first to see whether a newer version is available), then fully quit and restart the AI app (Cmd-Q on macOS, File → Quit on Windows — closing the window isn’t enough) so it reloads the tools.

Confirm before you believe it

If a model says a feature is broken, check it from a second angle before accepting that:

• Ask it to retry the exact same request.
• Run the same thing on the CLI — e.g. atbridge compose render --help shows how to build a branded email, then point --spec at a small JSON file and render it.
• Try it from a second AI client.

If one client works and another doesn’t, the failing client is the problem — the product is fine.

Ask your AI not to substitute

If a tool call fails, the right move is to tell you why and stop — not to quietly do the task a different way and mark it done. You can say so directly: “if atbridge fails, tell me why and stop; don’t do it another way instead.”

Still stuck?

Email contact@atbridge.ai with the output of:

atbridge --version
atbridge bridge status --pretty

We usually answer within a day.

Where to go next

• When your AI says it has no atbridge.ai tools
• When activation fails

Faster: ask the community

For “how do I…” questions you will usually get a quicker answer — and help the next person with the same question — in Discord or the Reddit community. Anything tied to your account, billing, or a bug is better as a support ticket, where we reply by email.