Node.js applications are increasingly defined by their dependency graph, yet most tooling still treats it as an opaque side effect. node_modules hides structure, workspaces are layered on, and understanding how dependencies relate (or even why they exist) remains surprisingly difficult.This talk introduces the vlt client and shows what becomes possible when the dependency graph is treated as a first-class JavaScript artifact. By exposing graph construction, resolution, traversal, and querying as reusable JavaScript primitives, vlt enables both powerful CLI workflows and entirely new classes of programmatic tooling. Building the client in JavaScript ensures that advances in package management feed directly back into the ecosystem, strengthening the shared library corpus and raising the ceiling for Node.js tooling.
