Every few years, the frontend community rallies around a faster build tool. Grunt gave way to Webpack. Webpack gave way to Parcel, then Rollup, then Vite. Each one measurably faster. Each one celebrated. And yet, there's a problem none of them ever touched: they all start from zero, every single time. This isn't a performance problem. It's an architectural one. The real issue: stateless pipelines When a build process exits — whether that's a dev server restart, a CI run, or a branch switch — everything it computed disappears. The dependency graph it built? Gone. The transforms it ran? Gone. The structural knowledge of your project it accumulated? Gone. We call this Past Amnesia. And on large projects, it's brutally expensive. On a large-scale with 25,000+ dependencies, a cold start with today's best tools can cost 40–90 seconds. even vite-8 cost build 2.4 seconds. Not because the machine is slow.…