When Bun Took Over My Node

xxx

Dec 10, 2025

1 min read

A personal debugging story about Bun overriding Node.js commands, what actually caused the issue, and the steps I took to resolve it.

#nextjs

#debugging

#tooling

#experiments

#typescript

# The Day Bun Staged a Coup

Sometimes, software doesn’t just fail—it conspires. This week, my Next.js dev server refused to run. The culprit? Bun, the shiny new JS runtime I had casually installed.

# Initial Failure

Running the development server with:

resulted in:

That began a long spiral of troubleshooting. I deleted node_modules, reinstalled them, removed Bun globally, tried running Node by its full path—nothing helped. Even npx had turned against me.

At this point, I wasn’t debugging. I was bargaining.

# The Plot Twist

Hours later, just when I was out of ideas and free LLM tokens were running low, I uncovered Bun’s secret hideout:

There it was: Bun’s fingerprints on everything. These shims were quietly intercepting node and replacing it with themselves. My entire environment was being rerouted through Bun without my knowledge.

# The Cleanup

Turns out the fix was nothing fancy. Just wipe the hideout:

Then I tried again:

Finally brought my server back to life. Imagine that.

# Moral of the Story

Bun tried to take over. I fought back. And I learned: curiosity is wonderful… but sometimes it comes with a hidden army in your home directory.

xxx

Plans, Agents, and the Illusion of Completion

A reflection on agentic implementation gaps, the illusion of completeness, and how to build plans that survive contact with reality

xxx

How Not To Ask An Agent For A Fix

I did eventually get the stale homepage issue sorted. The more interesting part was how much conversational wandering it took to get there, and what that taught me about using gpt-5.4 for design thinking instead of just code generation.