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DaveScott1
Participant
September 9, 2026
Question

How do I get the AI Assistant in after effects to inspect my project? It continues to return "Error: Error [RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND): Could not load "describe" from skill "ae-inspect"."?

  • September 9, 2026
  • 3 replies
  • 12 views

After Effects AI Assistant cannot access the After Effects project tools.

I saved the project, fully quit and reopened After Effects Beta, reopened the project, waited for it to load, and started an entirely new Assistant chat.

The prompt I used:
“Inspect the active composition and all nested compositions. Do not modify anything. Give me a complete hierarchy of the active layers, source footage, nested comps, effects, expressions, blending modes, and animated properties.”

The Assistant reported that no After Effects inspect, compose, edit, animate, render, or project-management tools were found in the session. It only reported document-reading and image/video-generation capabilities.

Exact error:
[RESOURCE_NOT_FOUND]: Could not load "describe" from skill "ae-inspect".

Unless I am just going crazy, but shouldn't the Assistant be able to read the active composition and return its composition/layer hierarchy without modifying the project?


The Assistant never accessed the project and could not load the ae-inspect skill.

This also occurred previously as a live-project connection failure in another new chat.

Has anyone figured out a solution to this? The ai assistant is completely useless in after effects for me?

Currently using Version 27.0.0 (Build 41)

    3 replies

    JohnColombo17100380
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    September 9, 2026

    Hi ​@DaveScott1,

    Thank you for reporting this issue. The behavior you’ve described is a bug, not the intended experience. If you close the Assistant panel, relaunch AE (Beta), then re-open the Assistant panel, does the error continue to happen?

    Thank you for any further info you can provide,

    - John, After Effects Engineering Team  

    DaveScott1
    Participant
    September 9, 2026

    John, I appreciate your response. I am working through the issue. On my end, I had to enable full disk access for the application, and the assistant now appears functional and is calling the inspection as expected.  

     

    It may be worth noting to users that if they already granted “Full Disk Access” to Adobe After Effects but the inspection tool is not working, they might need to disable and re-enable that system-level setting. I will report back if I encounter other problems, but for now the tool seems fixed after I provided full disk access.

    JohnColombo17100380
    Community Manager
    Community Manager
    September 9, 2026

    Thank you for the follow-up, ​@DaveScott1, and glad to hear it is now working for you.

    Full Disk Access shouldn’t be required for the Assistant, but it is good for our investigation to know that it might be a factor.

    Cheers,

    - John, After Effects Engineering Team