Dependency and Environment Debugging

Dependency bugs are the errors that make developers question their career choices. "It works on my machine." "It worked yesterday." "I did not change anything." These are symptoms of environment drift — different Node versions, different package versions, different OS configurations, different environment variables. Claude cannot see your environment directly, but it can diagnose from evidence.

The diagnostic prompt: "This code works in CI but fails locally. Here is the error, my Node version (node -v), my package versions (npm ls), and my environment (env | grep relevant). What is different?" Claude cross-references the versions, identifies mismatches, and suggests the fix. Common findings: a package that requires Node 18+ running on Node 16, a peer dependency conflict that npm resolved differently on two machines, or an environment variable that is set in CI but missing locally.