I've never seen a situation where an artifact can't be found by lein,, but manually using another resolver to cache the artifact fixed it - lein is looking for an artifact with a specific tag (RELEASE), and reagent-frontend/lein-template isn't offering anything with that tag

also, why did it only check your local cache, and not search maven or clojars?

RELEASE depends on being able to read repository metadata files, which are not always available or up to date

(Common problem with s3 repos, although I doubt that’s relevant here)