InDesign crashes while your AI assistant edits a table

You ask Claude (or any other AI assistant) to clean up a table — remove some rows, restructure it — and InDesign abruptly quits. Sometimes it happens again right after you reopen everything and the assistant picks up where it left off.

The crash is not the assistant damaging your document, and it’s not a Sidekick malfunction. It’s a long-standing bug in InDesign itself.

What’s actually happening

Deleting a table row can crash InDesign under certain conditions — most reliably when the deleted row is the table’s last remaining row. This has been on Adobe’s books for years: their bug tracker has an entry for exactly this case — InDesign crashing when a script removes a table row, another for deleting a row from the menu, and Adobe’s own release notes show table-related crashes still being patched as recently as the August 2026 update. We’ve reproduced it ourselves on the current InDesign 2026 release.

When an assistant edits tables for you, it’s performing those same row operations — just faster and more often than you would by hand. That’s why the bug surfaces more with Sidekick than in day-to-day manual work.

Why it can happen twice in a row

When InDesign crashes, the assistant only sees that the connection dropped — it can’t yet tell a crash apart from you simply closing InDesign. So after you reopen everything, it may re-run the exact same table edit and trigger the exact same crash. We’re working on making Sidekick recognize a crash for what it is, so the assistant stops re-trying the edit that caused it.

What to do

Save before table work. If InDesign crashes, its recovery feature usually restores saved documents — but in our testing, a document that has never been saved doesn’t always come back. Hit save before letting the assistant loose on tables.

Give the assistant a ground rule. Paste this at the start of a session that involves tables:

Never delete the last remaining row of a table — delete or rebuild the whole table instead. Clear a row’s contents before removing it.

We’ve verified both of those routes directly: they don’t trigger the crash.

If it already crashed: reopen InDesign and let its document recovery run. Then give the assistant the ground rule above before continuing, and mention what it was doing when InDesign went down — that stops it from repeating the same edit.

Still stuck?

If InDesign keeps crashing on table edits even with the ground rule in place, email us at [email protected] with your InDesign version (Help → About InDesign) and whether you’re on Mac or Windows — that helps us pin down crash variants and report them to Adobe.