I find it odd that you would have commands in ~/bin but not have it be the highest priority in your PATH. I use ~/.local/bin, but would never type it because i wouldn't have bins that overlap shell commands and no other path would have priority.
Usually, it is. IIRC, this was when I was just setting up my environment on a new host, after I had populated ~/bin but before I restarted my shell to pick up PATH modifications.