I spent two hours today debugging why an MCP server wouldn't connect. The error message indicated that the command "desktop-commander" was not found. Simple enough. Except it wasn't.

The actual problem was that sharp, an image processing library for Node.js buried four dependencies deep, couldn't build its native bindings on my M1 Mac running Node 20.18.2. When sharp's postinstall script failed, npm silently rolled back the entire package installation. No binary got linked. The MCP server never existed in the first place.

But npm reported success. All I saw were deprecation warnings.

This phenomenon is what happens when you stack abstractions too high. I was using npx, which downloads packages on demand. npx called npm, which tried to install desktop-commander. desktop-commander depends on sharp. sharp needs prebuilt native binaries for your specific combination of OS, architecture, and Node version. If those binaries don't exist, it falls back to building from source. Building from source requires node-gyp, which requires Python and a C++ compiler. My stack was darwin + arm64 + Node 20.18.2. The prebuilt binaries didn't exist for that combination.

Somewhere in this chain, something failed. But every layer above it just said "worked" or printed unrelated warnings about deprecated packages.

The fix was to bypass all of it. I installed the package locally with npm install --ignore-scripts, then manually added the platform-specific sharp binary. Then I pointed my config directly at the JavaScript file instead of going through npx. These steps took two hours to figure out. The actual commands took thirty seconds.

What's interesting about this case isn't the specific bug. It's the pattern. Every layer of abstraction you add is another place where errors can be swallowed, transformed, or misreported. Using npx is convenient because it allows you to avoid installing packages globally. But it also means every invocation potentially triggers a fresh npm install, with all the failure modes that entails.

The people who design these tools optimize for the happy path. When everything works, npx is magic. You type one command, and a tool appears. However, the error paths are often overlooked. The failure mode for "native binary doesn't exist for your platform" shouldn't be "silently fail and don't create the executable." It should be a clear error: "Could not find prebuilt sharp binary for darwin-arm64-node-20.18.2. Either build from source or use a different Node version." Instead, I got exit code 1 buried in verbose logs, while the normal output showed nothing but deprecation warnings.

There's a reason experienced developers are suspicious of too many layers. It's not because they're curmudgeons who hate progress. It's because they've been burned by this exact failure mode: silent failures in deep dependency chains. The instinct to reach for a simpler solution—"just run node directly on the script"—isn't technophobia. It's operational wisdom. Fewer layers means fewer places for things to go wrong, and when they do go wrong, the errors are more likely to be useful.

The irony is that all these layers exist to make things easier. npx exists so you don't have to manage global installs. sharp exists so JavaScript developers don't have to write C++ image processing code. Native binaries exist so users don't need a compiler toolchain. Each layer solves a real problem.

But the problems compound. Each layer that can fail silently is one that makes debugging exponentially harder. You end up spending two hours chasing "command not found" through a maze of package managers, postinstall scripts, and platform-specific binary distributions.

The lesson isn't "don't use abstractions." That would be stupid. The lesson is: know what's under your abstractions, and have a plan for when they break. When npx didn't work, I knew to try a local npm install. When that failed on sharp, I knew to try --ignore-scripts. When that worked, I knew to manually install the platform binary. Each step down removed a layer and got me closer to the actual problem.

If I'd only ever used npx and never thought about what it was doing, I'd still be stuck. The abstraction would have become a black box I couldn't debug. The developers who move fastest aren't the ones who know the most tools. They're the ones who can quickly drop down a layer when something breaks. That requires knowing, at least roughly, what each layer is actually doing.