Edit Tool Silent Failures When File Open in Rebel Editor

🐛 Technical Support
1

TL;DR

The Edit tool sometimes reports “success” but doesn’t actually apply changes when a file is open in Rebel’s built-in editor (even when just reading). This didn’t happen when read-only mode was available.

What’s Happening

When I have a file open in Rebel’s editor (just reading, not editing), and Claude tries to modify it using the Edit tool, some edits work fine while others fail silently:

  • Edit to Section A: :white_check_mark: Works

  • Edit to Section B: :cross_mark: Reports “success” but changes not applied

  • Edit to Section C: :white_check_mark: Works

  • Retry Section B: :cross_mark: Still fails silently

No clear pattern for which edits succeed vs fail.

Key Detail: Read-Only Mode Regression

This issue didn’t occur when Rebel had read-only mode for the editor.

Previously, I could open files in read-only mode, and the Edit tool worked consistently. Now that read-only mode is missing, files are always opened in editable mode, which seems to create conflicts with the Edit tool even when I’m not manually editing.

Impact

  • Confusing for both user and AI (we both think changes were applied)

  • Wastes time debugging why “completed” changes aren’t visible

  • Requires workarounds (creating temp files, manual copy-paste, or closing files)

Workaround

Claude creates a temp file with the new content, and I manually copy-paste. Works but not ideal.

Environment

  • macOS (darwin 25.3.0 arm64)

  • Rebel v0.4.9 stable

  • File only open in Rebel’s built-in editor (not VS Code or other external editors)

  • File size: ~12KB markdown

Request

Could read-only mode be restored for the built-in editor? That seemed to solve this conflict previously.

Side note: I tried publishing this post directly from Rebels, but I don’t see the RebelsCommunityWrite connector among the connectors yet :cry:

2

Thanks for the detailed report, sgrandi! We tracked this down to a race condition between the file watcher and auto-save.

We’ve got a fix in place and it should ship in the next release, likely within the next couple of days. Appreciate you flagging this one, the repro steps and the read-only mode context were really helpful in pinpointing the issue!

3

Happy to hear that, thanks for the super quick response!

4

Hi - thanks for the detailed note.

For visibility, we recently released the Rebel Community (Write) mcp. So after adding that (via Settings > Connectors) in Rebel, you will be able to post on this forum from Rebel much more seamlessly in future :handshake: