Reading Errors

When something breaks, and things will break, the terminal is going to show you an error. It’ll usually be red text, looks scary, very intimidating. But it’s actually trying to help you.

The key thing to look for is the error message itself, which is usually at the top or the bottom of all that red text. It’ll say something like “cannot find module” or “undefined is not a function” or “connection refused.”

And then there’s usually a stack trace, which is all those file paths and line numbers. It’s showing you where the error happened. Like, “the problem is in this file, on line 47.” So you can go look at that line and see what’s wrong.

The good news is you don’t need to understand most of this yourself. You copy the error, you paste it to the coding agent, and you say “fix this.” The agent is really good at reading errors because it’s seen millions of them. It’ll go, “Oh, this means you forgot to install that dependency,” or “You’ve got a typo here.” And it’ll fix it for you.

Over time, you’ll start recognizing common ones. Like, “ENOENT” just means file not found. “ECONNREFUSED” means it couldn’t connect to something, maybe your database isn’t running. You’ll pick up the patterns.