Nova’s expert opinion in Episode 2 is that the computer is wrong. Occasionally the environment really is the problem: a stale cache, a different Node version, a missing environment variable. More often, the code is.
Check the boring things first
- Versions: runtime, dependencies, and lockfile. Does it match where the code works?
- State: caches, build artifacts, database contents, stale containers.
- Configuration: environment variables and feature flags on this machine versus others.
Then ask a better question
List what would have to be true for this code to be correct
and still produce this error. For each, tell me how to check it.That question turns “it’s not my code” into a checklist, and the checklist usually points back to the code.