Why Your AI Side-Hustle Script Won't Run: 5 JavaScript Config Failures That Break Claude/OpenAI Tools (and How to Isolate Node v

If you've ever copied a working AI automation script, run node tool.js, and watched it die with Cannot use import statement outside a module or fetch is not defined — this article gets you unstuck. By the end you'll have a 30-second decision tree to tell whether the bug lives in your package.json, your tsconfig.json, or your runtime, plus two copy-paste diagnostic scripts that print exactly which environment you're in and why your imports resolved the way they did. These five failures account f...