Hi James,

That message is usually printed by Node when the V8 inspector/debugger is enabled. It often shows up as [error] in logs because Node writes the inspector banner to stderr, even if your app did not throw an actual exception.

I’d check for anything enabling --inspect in the deployed environment:

1
grep -R --line-number "inspect\|inspector\|NODE_OPTIONS" .
2

Then check these places specifically:

1
package.json scripts
2
Vercel Project Settings → Environment Variables
3
any custom server / instrumentation file
4
any code importing node:inspector or inspector
5

The most suspicious one would be a production env var like:

1
NODE_OPTIONS=--inspect
2
NODE_OPTIONS=--inspect=0
3
NODE_OPTIONS=--inspect-brk
4

If the log appears only when visiting that article page, I’d also check server-side code used by that route, especially any recently added debugging/profiling package or custom instrumentation.

If removing the inspector-related option makes the message disappear, then it was just Node starting the debugger, not a Vercel routing issue or someone accessing your site directly.

Yea so this ended up being Sentry while including includeLocalVariables in the config. Removing that removed this error in the logs.