Ionic CLI does not seem to be backwards compatible for me

It seems that every time I work on an Ionic 2 app and Want to go back and continue working on my ionic 1.7.14 app my Ionic CLI thinks I want to use Ionic 2 and I have to re-install ionic 1.7.14 in order to run simple ionic commands…

I get this…

$ ionic info
WARN: ionic.project has been renamed to ionic.config.json, please rename it.
Uh oh! Looks like you're missing a module in your gulpfile:
Cannot find module 'bower'

Do you need to run `npm install`?

In the past I have switch to Node 4.4.4 and now I need to also re-install ionic 1.7.14 via npm to get my ionic 1 projects to build and run CLI commands…

What can be the issue?

Yo Abel! it’s Marcus From GA! Did you ever find the answer to this issue? Im getting the same error after running ionic serve --lab in a project made in Ionic 1…