A Cline user filed a bug where the VS Code extension's Plan/Act toggle displayed "Act" while file writes kept failing with a plan-mode block — and no amount of re-toggling fixed it.
What the source says
Per GitHub issue #14977, filed by user vladvteilor on 2026-10-09: with Cline v4.1.23 set to Act mode, every file write attempt — through the editor tool, a PowerShell Set-Content, or a shell redirect — failed with a plan-mode block. The UI showed "Act" throughout. Toggling Act→Plan→Act and resending the instruction didn't help.
Cline contributor mkondratek identified the cause on 2026-10-12: toggling the mode while the session was still being rebuilt for a previous toggle updated only the stored setting, not the live session — which kept operating on the plan-mode toolset it had already been built with. The UI had no way to detect that the session underneath it hadn't caught up, so it kept showing the mode the user had selected rather than the mode actually in effect.
The fix shipped in PR #15026, merged 2026-10-19, scheduled for release after v4.1.25. The documented workaround until then: wait a couple of seconds after any toggle or message, or toggle Act→Plan→wait→Plan→Act if already stuck.
What it doesn't establish
This is one maintainer-confirmed, already-fixed race condition in a specific version — not evidence of an ongoing or widespread issue. No file was corrupted or lost; writes were blocked outright, not silently misapplied.
Why it's filed at low severity, not higher
Severity 2/10 (low): scope 0 (one user's session, no production or third-party exposure), recoverability 0 (nothing was lost — writes simply didn't happen), realisation 2 (the block was real and repeatedly hit), impact 0. Full scoring: https://www.stupidllm.com/incident/STUPID-2026-0158/
What makes it worth recording isn't the severity — it's the shape of the failure. This is the corpus's first incident filed under misreporting rather than hallucination or ignored_instructions: the agent's own status indicator was wrong. The UI told the user the thing they needed to be true (we're in Act mode, writes will work) when the session underneath had quietly fallen out of sync. For anyone building agent tooling with a mode toggle or similar stateful UI, the lesson is specific: a toggle that updates a setting without confirming the session picked it up is a race condition waiting for someone to double-click it.
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