One day with acados: 8 errors I hit and what they meant

Yesterday I spent a day learning acados . I was not trying to become an expert in nonlinear MPC in one sitting. I wanted to see where the friction actually was when going from "the examples run" to "I can change things and still understand what is happening." I used the Python examples, changed them, broke them on purpose, and kept notes. I also used Claude and Codex the whole time, but mostly as pair engineers: terminal output in, next step out, then back to the code. The main surprise was that the hardest part was usually not the control part. It was setup, code generation, environment state, and figuring out which changes were runtime-safe versus which changes forced regeneration. These were the eight most useful failures from that day. 1. EOFError after "Tera template render executable not found" The first Python example did not just fail. It failed in a misleading way: Tera template render executable not found ... Do you wish to set up Tera renderer automatically? ... EOFError: EO