Executive Summary

Frontend and full‑stack engineers, devtools maintainers, and platform/infra teams increasingly hit a narrow but painful failure mode: modern monorepos, pnpm-style symlinked node_modules and atomic installs can make node_modules/next briefly unresolvable, and fast dev servers like Turbopack and Vite frequently crash rather than recover, costing minutes per incident and disrupting flow. This is especially visible in teams using shared caches, CI parallel installs, or aggressive file‑system operations where transient resolution events are common. You could build a lightweight resolution-guard that sits as a dev-server plugin and in the Node module resolution layer, detecting transient EMODULENOTFOUND/ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND events and retrying, warming a local durable cache, or falling back to a safe degraded mode without crashing the server; add observability (SLA metrics, incident telemetry), configurable retry windows, and adapters for pnpm/Yarn PnP/Classic npm to cover common package-manager behaviors. Keep it non-invasive with an opt-in integration path for Next.js, Vite, Turbopack and a small runtime footprint so teams adopt it as a reliability shim rather than a replacement. The timing is favorable: the developer tools market is roughly $10.4B (26M professional developers × $400 average annual spend), with a Market Score of 88/100 and Revenue Potential at 80/100, driven by growing monorepo/pnpm adoption and rising expectations for instant, resilient dev loops that make small DX wins monetizable. Teams already pay for build infra and DX tooling, and a low‑friction reliability fix maps cleanly to existing budgets. Competition appears low, so differentiation will come from deep, tested integrations with Next.js, Vite and Turbopack, enterprise observability and defensible reliability guarantees. The main challenges are cross-platform symlink semantics, keeping overhead negligible, and convincing teams to pay for what they might initially treat as an ops problem—success will require technical investment and partnerships with framework vendors and platform teams rather than pure marketing.

Market Opportunity

Prevent dev-server crashes when node_modules/next is briefly unresolvable targets a $10.4B = 26M professional developers x $400 avg annual spend on dev tools/build infra total addressable market with low saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 15%.

Key trends driving demand: Monorepos & pnpm adoption -- more symlinked node_modules and atomic install patterns increase transient resolution events; Shift to faster dev servers (Turbopack/Vite) -- faster pipelines expose brittle cache failure modes and increase expectation for instant recovery; Dev-obsessed DX spending -- engineering teams invest in tools that avoid time-wasting edge failures and tooling churn.

Key competitors include Vercel (Next.js/Turbopack), Vite (Evan You et al.), pnpm, Sentry (error monitoring).

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Prevent dev-server crashes when node_modules/next is briefly unresolvable

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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