Preserve negative-zero in inspected values — lossless devtools serialization

Frontend and full‑stack engineers, observability teams, and developer tooling vendors routinely lose critical fidelity when inspecting numeric values: JavaScript’s -0 collapses to 0 in many serializers and devtools views, breaking Object.is checks, snapshot tests, SSR/hydration comparisons and replay debugging in subtle ways that increase MTTR. This matters especially for teams debugging client‑side rendering mismatches or deterministic replays; at an addressable market of roughly $4.8B (2.4M development teams × $2K average annual tooling spend) the problem is small in bytes but costly in time for many teams. The product would be a lossless devtools serialization layer and compact payload format (library + devtools integration + CI/CLI tooling) that preserves negative zero and other edge primitives while remaining JSON‑safe and low overhead; think a tiny OSS library with reversible encodings, a patchable devtools inspector extension, and plugins for Jest, Playwright, Sentry and major logging pipelines. Implementation choices include a minimal metadata wrapper (e.g., typed markers or short sentinel strings) with automatic round‑trip decoding, deterministic diffs for snapshots, and optional upstreamable patches for browser devtools to avoid ecosystem lock‑in. Timing is favorable: observability proliferation, the growth of SSR/hydration complexity, and the OSS‑first mentality all drive willingness to adopt small, patchable improvements to debuggability; the market score of 88/100 and revenue potential of 72/100 reflect a real but not explosive opportunity. To stand out you’d focus on low latency and minimal storage overhead, clean developer ergonomics, strong OSS governance to encourage upstreaming into browsers and frameworks, and integrations with established observability vendors—while acknowledging the main challenges: convincing platform maintainers, achieving broad adoption, and keeping the encoding backwards compatible and performant.