Troubleshooting Abaqus through sim-cli

Abaqus not detected

Symptom. sim check abaqus reports the solver as missing; sim run --solver abaqus exits immediately with a launcher error.
Diagnostic. uv run sim plugin doctor abaqus --deep.
Likely fix. Confirm a licensed Abaqus install is on the host. If the launcher is not on PATH, point sim-cli at it explicitly via the documented SIM_ABAQUS_COMMAND environment variable.

Symptom. Job submits but exits in the first few seconds with a *ERROR: ABAQUS LICENSE message in the .log or .sta file.
Diagnostic. Submit a tiny known-good .inp from the command line outside sim-cli to confirm licensing is healthy, then uv run sim plugin doctor abaqus --deep.
Likely fix. Resolve the license-server error with your Abaqus administrator — sim-cli does not proxy license traffic.

Symptom. Agent thinks an Abaqus/CAE session is open but sim exec snippets target a different process, or the CAE database file is locked by a stray previous run.
Diagnostic. uv run sim inspect session.summary.
Likely fix. sim disconnect, kill any orphan abaqus cae or standard/explicit processes, then reconnect with the documented --driver-option cae_file=... pointing at the canonical .cae path.

Symptom. Agent reports results from one ODB but a fresh inspection shows different field outputs, or post-processing references a stale ODB path.
Diagnostic. uv run sim inspect session.summary and confirm the ODB path matches the job that the agent thinks it just ran.
Likely fix. Re-run the job into a clean working directory so each ODB has a unique path, and ask the agent to save a checkpoint that records the canonical ODB path after every successful step.

Symptom. *INPUT keywords or CAE Python attribute names that don’t exist; ODB queries fail with attribute errors.
Diagnostic. Re-read the bundled sim-abaqus skill in .agents/skills/sim-abaqus/ (or .claude/skills/sim-abaqus/).
Likely fix. Re-prompt the agent with: “Do not guess Abaqus CAE or keyword names. Inspect the model first, then use only names returned by the inspection.” If the skill is missing, re-run uv run sim plugin sync-skills --target .agents/skills --copy.