Running npm watch as non-root fails - why?

I’m trying to execute npm run watch or npm run dev, but as my user – every time I do, I get errors such as:

 94% asset optimization
[at-loader] Checking started in a separate process...

[at-loader] Ok, 1.523 sec.

 95% emittingError: EACCES: permission denied, open '/Users/ctote/Documents/dev/grafana/src/github.com/grafana/grafana/public/build/0.a10d523c5835a4253aa8.js'
    at Error (native)
error An unexpected error occurred: "Command failed.
Exit code: 1
Command: sh
Arguments: -c webpack --progress --colors --config scripts/webpack/webpack.dev.js
Directory: /Users/ctote/Documents/dev/grafana/src/github.com/grafana/grafana
Output:
".

The only way around this is to run as sudo npm run watch – the problem with this being that it makes it difficult for me to debug from an IDE that wasn’t likewise launched as root. Can I get around this somehow so I don’t have to hack up my IDE to be able to debug?