Both workflows clone numbl bare and install nothing into it, on the premise -- written into the comment above the step -- that the slice we import is self-contained TypeScript. That was true while we only used the compiler internals. Seeding runs from random fields made randnfun3.ts import executeCode, and the interpreter is not self-contained: it imports ./stdlib-bundle.js, which numbl generates from its stdlib/*.m and gitignores. A bare checkout does not have it, so every job since the merge died at import time with ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND before a single test ran. It passes locally only because a working numbl checkout has been built. Run the generator after the checkout. It reads .m files off disk and imports nothing but fs and path, so plain node -- type stripping has been unflagged since 22.18, and the runner is on 24 -- executes the .ts source directly. numbl still needs no node_modules and CI acquires no new registry dependency. Verified against a fresh blob-filtered clone with no node_modules: the generator runs, and the full node suite passes through it.