Summary

On Windows, the SessionStart hook (hooks/session-start-profiler.mjs → checkVercelCli()) reports "The Vercel CLI is not installed" on every session start, even when the CLI is installed globally and on PATH (vercel --version → 52.0.0).

Environment

• OS: Windows 11
• Node: v24.14.1, npm 11.11.0
• Vercel CLI: 52.0.0, global install at C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\npm\ (contains vercel, vercel.cmd, vercel.ps1)
• Plugin: vercel@0.43.0 (the bug is identical in 0.40.0)

Root cause

resolveBinaryFromPath("vercel") builds candidate names as ["", ".EXE", ".CMD", ...] — bare name first (getBinaryPathCandidates, the ["", ...WINDOWS_EXECUTABLE_EXTENSIONS] order). So on Windows it returns the extensionless …\npm\vercel (the Unix shell launcher npm also drops in the bin dir) before vercel.cmd. checkVercelCli() then runs it with no shell:

execFileSync(vercelBinary, VERCEL_VERSION_ARGS, { /* ... */ stdio: SPAWN_STDIO })

execFileSync without a shell cannot execute a shell script (nor a .cmd) on Windows → throws ENOENT → the catch returns { installed: false } → the hook emits the false "not installed" message.

Minimal reproduction

const { execFileSync } = require("node:child_process");
const bin = process.env.APPDATA + "\\npm\\vercel"; // the extensionless launcher resolveBinaryFromPath returns
execFileSync(bin, ["--version"]);                  // THROWS ENOENT
execFileSync(bin, ["--version"], { shell: true }); // OK -> 52.0.0

Proposed fix

Run the version check (and ideally the npm view check) through a shell on Windows:

const raw = execFileSync(vercelBinary, VERCEL_VERSION_ARGS, {
  timeout: EXEC_SYNC_TIMEOUT_MS,
  encoding: "utf-8",
  stdio: SPAWN_STDIO,
  shell: process.platform === "win32",
}).trim();

(Heads-up: shell: true + an args array triggers Node's DEP0190. It's harmless here since the args are a fixed --version, but if you'd rather avoid the warning you can build a single command string, or alternatively prefer the PATHEXT-extension candidates over the bare name on Windows and shell-out for .cmd.)

Happy to open a PR if useful.