Inspect Rust async state machines via compiler-desugaring visualization

Rust async/await desugars into compiler-generated state machines that are often opaque to the developer, making it hard to reason about poll semantics, await points, lifetimes and surprising wake orders. This problem primarily affects backend/cloud-native engineers, systems programmers and maintainers of long-lived async services within the estimated 8,000,000 developers who contribute to the $4.8B tooling market, and it also burdens toolsmiths and new Rust adopters who spend disproportionate time debugging async interactions. The result is lost developer productivity and longer incident resolution times for teams running async-first architectures. You could build a tool that extracts MIR/HIR-level representations from rustc and rust-analyzer, reconstructs the compiler-desugared async state machines, and renders interactive visualizations that map states, await points, local-variable liveness and poll transitions back to original source lines. Deliver this as an IDE plugin (VS Code, CLion), a CLI artifact for CI and an optional low-overhead runtime tracer so teams can inspect both the static state machine and observed runtime behavior. Timing favors this product: enterprise Rust adoption and cloud-native async usage are growing, compiler-as-a-platform work has made IRs more accessible, and the $4.8B addressable tooling market (roughly $600/year per developer) indicates companies will pay for productivity improvements. The competitive landscape is medium—existing debuggers and profilers rarely expose desugared-state visualizations tied to borrow/liveness and source mapping—so deep compiler integration and a UX that hides compiler complexity would be a clear differentiator. Key challenges are keeping pace with rustc internals, supporting multiple editors, and proving ROI; a focused go-to-market aimed at teams running complex async services where a 10–30% reduction in debugging time is plausible would make the path to initial revenue realistic.