The Morning I Lost to Playwright
A couple of Tuesdays ago I renamed a label, nudged a Tailwind class, and watched half my Playwright suite light up red. No customers felt a thing—yet I spent the whole morning juggling screenshots and sprinkling fresh data-test-id across my app just to get green again.
Confidence ≠ joy when your tests demand that much babysitting.
Modern Tools, Same Old Headaches
Playwright, Cypress, Detox—on paper they promise “set and forget.” In practice they feel like Tamagotchis: feed them selectors, clean up after flaky specs, hope they survive your next A/B toggle. Move fast, and they slow you down. Skip them, and you ship with crossed fingers.
The Velocity Paradox
Startups usually pick one of two poisons:
- Over-tested – A full-time QA engineer soothing brittle E2Es, every UI tweak grinding the team to a halt.
- Under-tested – Zero automated checks, every deploy followed by a silent prayer and Sentry on permanent refresh.
I’ve lived on both ends. Neither feels like the future.
Meet TestingBee — Intent, Not Selectors
I built TestingBee to break the false choice between speed and safety. Instead of anchoring to fragile DOM nodes, TestingBee tracks what your user is trying to accomplish—“sign up,” “add to cart,” “finish checkout”—and adapts when the UI shifts beneath it. You describe the goal in plain English, click Save, and move on.
A Living, Self-Healing Safety Net
Creating a test now takes about as long as writing a Slack message. And because the test understands intent, it survives:
- Tiny UI polish – buttons move, labels change, tests still pass.
- Big product pivots – rewrite the goal in English, click once, you’re covered.
- Team-wide ownership – PMs and designers can read or edit tests without touching code.
Fast iteration without the Friday-deploy dread.
Ready to Buzz?
If you’re tired of locator whack-a-mole—or tired of crossing your fingers on every release—grab early access at testingbee.io (free while we smooth the edges). Tell me what breaks, what shines, and what you need next.
Let’s keep shipping quickly—minus the whiplash.
— Spencer