Troubleshooting
Fixes for the most common problems, in the order to try them.
ML.ai asks for an access token
Go to Settings → Provider and paste a valid ML.ai access token, restarting the engine if prompted. If it still asks, the token may have been revoked or copied incompletely: confirm it starts with ml-ai_ and runs to 38 characters, then sign in again. See settings reference.
The engine never becomes ready
Use the restart control on the startup screen, or run ML.ai: Restart Engine from the Command Palette. If it still won't come up, run ML.ai: Copy Engine Diagnostics and include the output in your support request.
Skills or agents are missing
Restart the engine: new subagents and skills are only picked up at startup. If the item is still missing after restarting, reload the window and confirm you actually have a folder open (ML.ai requires a workspace, not loose files). A skill with malformed frontmatter is silently skipped by the engine, so also check that if the missing item is a skill.
Approvals have stopped appearing
There are exactly two mechanisms in ML.ai that can make a prompt stop appearing, and checking them in order rules each one out quickly:
Check Auto-approve
Look at the Auto button in the composer bar. If it's on, every prompt is being answered immediately rather than shown to you.
Check for a saved Always rule
Open the saved permissions list and look for a rule matching the operation you expected to be asked about. Revoke it if you don't want it anymore. Remember that in a non-Git workspace, an Always rule is saved globally, so a rule created in an unrelated folder can be the one silencing prompts here.
See permission prompts and auto-approve for how each of these works.
A command was refused and you disagree with it
The ML.ai output channel logs every verdict from the command safety classifier, including which part of the command triggered the refusal and why. That log is what to attach to a report. If you need to get past it in the meantime, ml-ai.commandSafety can turn the classifier off. But this reverts to prompting on every shell command; it doesn't selectively allow the one you wanted.
Windows reports ML.ai unavailable
Confirm you're on VS Code 1.125.0 or later, and that you're on x64: this release does not ship a Windows ARM64 build. See installation.
A published update did not install
Reload VS Code, then run Extensions: Check for Extension Updates. If you previously installed a local VSIX of the same version, uninstall ML.ai first, then reinstall: a VSIX install and a Marketplace install of the same version can conflict.