Currently the atuin daemon is either disabled or enabled via the config file; it can’t try to connect and fallback if a connection can’t be made.
This causes a problem in a variable environment, e.g. I have a rootfs for a virtual machine in which it is fully booted and the daemon is running, but I also do some lightweight checks and maintenance work with nspawn and the shell as pid 1, thus no daemon is running, and atuin is complaining.