Requests timing out

[mrehler]

I installed the CLI today. I got signed in just fine, but then was getting the error

Warning: Could not fetch tools: MCP error -32001: Request timed out

On most things I ran. readwise --help would return eventually, after about 60 seconds. I tried doing everything I could with Claude to fix the problem. Watching where network traffic was going, hitting curl requests to try to check the connectability of those servers. No matter what I did, I kept getting that time out error.

---

I figured I'd paste in some extra details that Claude suggested.

Readwise CLI v0.5.6, readwise --help and most other commands fail with Could not fetch tools: MCP error -32001: Request timed out after consistently ~60 seconds. Confirmed:

• curl -v https://mcp2.readwise.io/mcp returns in ~0.2s
• npx -y mcp-remote https://mcp2.readwise.io/mcp connects instantly and establishes the proxy successfully against the same URL
• Fresh login (readwise login after deleting ~/.readwise-cli.json) completes fast
• readwise --refresh still times out the same way
• Same result across multiple sessions/days, not a one-off

[faulomi]

I confirm that this issue is still present as of today.

[bkarakoc]

I found the solution, it was to downgrade Node to a LTS version (24/22). It doesn't work with Node v26. and that's what was causing the issue for me. If you can't change the global Node version, run readwise under an LTS Node via a version manager (nvm/fnm) or a wrapper script.