Sidekick is using the copy that came with your install

You asked your AI assistant to run sidekick health and one of the lines says:

Sidekick is serving the implementation that shipped with this install; no downloaded implementation is active yet.

What it means: Sidekick keeps its InDesign know-how in a separate file that it normally downloads and keeps up to date on its own, so improvements reach you without reinstalling anything. Every install also carries its own copy of that file as a spare. This message means the spare is currently doing the work.

Everything works. Reading layouts, editing text, moving objects, snapshots — all of it. What you’re missing is anything we’ve improved since the day you installed.

Often it’s nothing at all. On a brand-new install, the spare copy starts serving straight away and the freshly downloaded one takes over a moment later. If you catch the health check in that window, the message is simply gone the next time you look.

When it’s worth a closer look is when it stays that way — after a restart, and the next day. Then something on your network is keeping Sidekick from reaching releases.sidekick.eastpole.nl: a company proxy, a firewall, a VPN, or simply no internet connection. The same health output usually names the cause — the problem line in its update section (called updateCheckError in older versions).

What to do about it:

1. Quit your AI assistant fully and reopen it, then run sidekick health again. On Windows, closing the window leaves it running in the system tray — right-click the tray icon near the clock and choose Quit.
2. If the message is still there, ask whoever manages your network to allow releases.sidekick.eastpole.nl. That single address is all Sidekick needs.
3. If that isn’t possible, you can keep working — the spare copy is a complete Sidekick, not a limited one. To pick up newer improvements without a download, install the latest version from the install page; its spare copy is current as of that release.

Sidekick 1.0.29 and later. Older versions carried no spare copy: if they couldn’t download, they came up with no InDesign abilities at all. That’s what this spare copy exists to prevent, and it’s also why the extension download is noticeably larger than it used to be.

This is not the same thing as the _0x5971 snapshot error — that was a bug in one batch of versions from July 2026, not a healthy fallback.