Introducing Vipr: See What's Wrong Before It Ships
Vipr is a code analysis toolkit for JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and Next.js. Meet the three surfaces (CLI, VSCode extension, and Desktop app) and the engine that powers them all.
Frontend codebases grow fast. What starts as a clean project with clear boundaries turns into a maze of tangled imports, bloated components, and functions nobody wants to touch. Linters catch syntax problems. Type checkers catch type problems. But nobody catches the structural rot: the creeping complexity that makes every feature take twice as long to build. That is the gap Vipr fills.
Vipr is a static analysis toolkit purpose-built for modern frontend stacks. It understands JavaScript, TypeScript, React, and Next.js at a level generic tools cannot. It computes cyclomatic complexity, Halstead metrics, and maintainability indices. It maps component hierarchies, detects oversized render functions, flags prop-drilling chains, and identifies dead exports. And it does all of this without running your code or sending it anywhere. Everything stays local.
We built Vipr around the idea that one analysis engine should power every surface a developer touches. The CLI is free. It runs in CI pipelines, outputs JSON or Markdown, and supports quality gates that fail a build when complexity thresholds are exceeded. The VSCode extension brings those same insights inline: CodeLens annotations, sidebar tree views, and a Copilot Chat participant that can answer questions about your codebase’s health. The Desktop app adds a persistent SQLite-backed dashboard with 40+ widgets, historical tracking across git commits, and snapshot comparisons so you can see how a refactor changed the numbers.
Under the hood, the analysis engine uses a plugin architecture. Each analyzer (Core, React, Next.js, TypeScript) runs independently, publishes typed results, and registers presenters through a central registry. This means the engine is extensible without coupling. A Next.js analyzer can claim files that a React analyzer would otherwise process, and the coordination happens automatically through canHandle() checks. The result is accurate, deduplicated analysis even when frameworks overlap.
The CLI is available today. Install it with npx @vipr/cli analyze src/. The VSCode extension and Desktop app are in private alpha; join the waitlist at vipr.dev to get early access when they ship. The core analysis is free forever. Pro upgrades are a one-time purchase. No subscriptions, no telemetry, no lock-in.