I was experimenting in dev with an app_data app extension for sidekick.
It suddenly stopped working.
I can still prompt sidekick about the app, it seems to successfully communicate with the app extension, then it says it can’t answer because of a “technical hiccup on that lookup”.
I asked about another app, it worked, then asked why the previous didn’t work. Here is its answer:
What I know for certain is just what the error itself told me: it’s called a “safety check” block, it happens after your app’s tool returns a response and before that response reaches me, and I’m told not to retry the same call once it happens. I genuinely don’t have visibility into the rule that fired, whether it’s content-pattern based, size-based, or something else.
If you’re building against the Sidekick app-extension surface, the right place for that spec would be Shopify’s developer/partner documentation for app-provided Sidekick tools, not something I can retrieve from here. I don’t want to guess at causes and risk sending you down the wrong path.
It’s an simple extension with simple hardcoded responses. Nothing fancy.
PS: On the forum there is no section for threads about sidekick extensions.
Exactly what I explained, sidekick communicates with the extension. I see activity and it takes time. And then it says it can’t use the data from the extension because of an error.
When I ask for details it answers that safety check blocked it.
Reloading the page, restarting the extension.. nothing helps.
My intuition is that something got flagged and the answers from the extensions are banned in some way. But I don’t have the tools to debug it.
There is no ways I can debug it by myself. It’s blocked by sidekick internally.
If you think it’s achievable I’m happy to hear about it
Super basic stuff. It simply explains what the app does, and exposes some FAQ directly to sidekick. Really nothing fancy.
As I said it just worked well, haven’t changed anything, and suddenly any prompt that requires to connect to the app eventually ends up with sidekick saying something went wrong internally.
This is all internal to Shopify. I wont speculate on what it is without a proper tool to debug or guidelines from the team.
This is the biggest clue that I shared in my initial post, and this comes directly from sidekick itself:
a “safety check” block, it happens after your app’s tool returns a response and before that response reaches me, and I’m told not to retry the same call once it happens
Your extension was blocked because it does not meet Shopify’s Sidekick extension best practices. Review Sidekick app extensions and update your extension.
I’ll review that. I guess some wording sound like marketing or something it does not like.
You can also add logs to your extension to see if it’s getting that far.
The security issue you mention should show up when you try to ‘deploy’ - so give that a go, and see if it gives you a security error.
In general, this is caused by prompts that do things like push Sidekick to suggest your application (i.e, obviously gray area stuff). I also don’t think this happens during dev, but only deploy - so I don’t think it’s that.
