Plain-English answers for when your AI coding or AI video tool does something weird.

Your AI coding or AI video tool just did something confusing. Find the symptom, get the plain-English reason and the fix. 17 symptoms documented so far, new ones most weeks.

Any AI coding tool

It works in the preview but breaks when I deploy itIn nine cases out of ten the deployed environment is missing something the preview had: an environment variable, a build step, a d
The AI agent is stuck in a loop, making the same change over and overThe agent is working from a stale picture of your code. It makes an edit, re-reads something that contradicts it, and "fixes" it b
The AI imported a package that doesn't exist ("module not found")The model invented a plausible-sounding library. It is called package hallucination, and it is normal: models predict likely text,
The AI rewrote my whole file when I asked for one small changeRegenerating the file is easier for the model than surgically patching it, so unless you constrain it, it rewrites — and quietly d

Claude Code

Claude Code says "context left until auto-compact" — what it meansIt is a fuel gauge, not an error. When the conversation gets close to the limit you set, Claude Code summarises everything so far
Claude Code: "String to replace not found in file"The Edit tool does an exact character-for-character match, and the text it is searching for no longer matches the file — usually b

Cursor

Cursor keeps editing the wrong fileCursor edits what it believes you meant, and it guesses from whatever is in its context: the open tab, the last file it touched, o

AI video & production workflow

The same four steps, for the tools that make the pictures and the voice: character drift, clip length, grade mismatch, and pipelines that fail silently.

Any AI video tool

Colour and exposure jump between my AI video clipsEach generation picks its own lighting, white balance and grade, so clips that should match do not. Fix it by matching on a refere
My AI video character's face changes between shotsText prompts do not carry identity between generations. Each clip is sampled independently, so the same description produces a dif

Veo / Gemini video

My AI video clip is shorter than I asked forMost hosted video models have a fixed clip length and silently ignore any duration you ask for in the prompt. Veo 3.1 generates 8-

AI voice (ElevenLabs)

My AI voiceover ignores pauses, or speeds up and adds noisesNewer ElevenLabs models do not support SSML break tags, and overusing break tags in older ones causes instability — the voice spee

AI video pipelines

My video agent pipeline produced a black or zero-byte fileAlmost always a failure that was never checked: a generation job that finished with an error status, a download that returned an e

What Broke This Week

One email, most Thursdays. New symptoms, tool updates that quietly break things, and one fix worth stealing. Unsubscribe in one click.