Kubeconfig error when running "pulumi refresh"

[alexandruchevul]

Hi,

We are using Pulumi with a backend stored in an AWS S3 bucket.
After I log in, everytime I execute 'pulumi refresh' I receive the following error multiple times:
warning: configured Kubernetes cluster is unreachable: failed to parse kubeconfig data in kubernetes:config:kubeconfig- couldn't get version/kind; json parse error: json: cannot unmarshal string into Go value of type struct { APIVersion string "json:\"apiVersion,omitempty\""; Kind string "json:\"kind,omitempty\"" } error: Preview failed: failed to read resource state due to unreachable cluster. If the cluster was deleted, you can remove this resource from Pulumi state by rerunning the operation with the PULUMI_K8S_DELETE_UNREACHABLE environment variable set to "true"

I am the only person who has this error, for my collegue it works correctly with the same KUBECONFIG.
The file does contain the following part in it:
`

• name: #####
  user:
  exec:
  apiVersion: client.authentication.k8s.io/v1beta

`

Pulumi version: 3.197.0
Python version: 3.13.2
pip list:
Package Version

---

anyio 4.10.0
Authlib 1.6.3
blinker 1.9.0
certifi 2025.8.3
cffi 1.17.1
charset-normalizer 3.4.3
click 8.2.1
colorama 0.4.6
cryptography 45.0.7
Flask 3.1.2
gunicorn 23.0.0
h11 0.16.0
httpcore 1.0.9
httpx 0.28.1
idna 3.10
itsdangerous 2.2.0
Jinja2 3.1.6
MarkupSafe 3.0.2
packaging 25.0
pip 25.2
pycparser 2.22
requests 2.32.5
sniffio 1.3.1
urllib3 2.5.0
Werkzeug 3.1.3

Any advice on finding the misconfiguration is welcome. Thanks in advance.

[alexandruchevul]

The KUBECONFIG is working correctly with k9s and with kubectl, pulumi is the only one that cannot work with it

[blampe]

You probably have stale credentials in your Pulumi state. This is a good use case for refresh --run-program.