Static AST Analysis Tool Detects Circular FastAPI Dependencies, Then Stalls on Environment Limits

A developer built a static analyzer that parses Python source into an abstract syntax tree to find circular Depends() chains in FastAPI applications before startup. The tool builds a directed dependency graph with networkx and reports cycles as JSON, aiming to catch errors that otherwise surface as runtime recursion failures. The project was ultimately classified as an incomplete prototype after three technical and operational bottlenecks emerged. The most immediate was that the QA environment lacked the orjson and networkx packages, which blocked the analyzer from running at all. The author notes the irony that a dependency-checking tool was stopped by its own external dependencies.