Discussion

Your AI agent says it's done.Get the proof.

Imustaskforhelp: Great to see this but exe.dev (not sponsored but they are pretty cool and I use them quite often, if they wish to sponsor me that would be awesome haha :-]) actually has this functionality natively built in.but its great to see some other open source alternatives within this space as well.

theshrike79: What does this do that playwright-cli doesn't?https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

zkmon: Taking screenshots and recording is not quite the same as "seeing". A camera doesn't see things. If the tool can identify issues and improvements to make, by analyzing the screenshot, that's I think useful.

VadimPR: Looks nice! Does it work for desktop applications as well, or is this only web dev?

Horos: what about mcp cdp ?my claude drive his own brave autonomously, even for ui ?

jofzar: > It’s not a testing framework. The agent doesn’t decide pass/fail. It just gives me the evidence so I don’t have to open the browser myself every time.From the OP, i don't think this is what is meant for what you are saying.

jofzar: These aren't really comparable, OP's is something that records, captures and reproduces with steps.

lastdong: This is basically what antigravity (Google’s Windsurf) ships with. Having more options to add this functionality to Open code / Claude code for local models is really awesome. MIT license too!

jofzar: I'm going the opposite of everyone else is saying.This is sick OP based on what's in the document, it looks really useful when you need to quickly fix something and need to validate the changes to make sure nothing has changed in the UI/workflow except what you have asked.Also looks useful for PR's, have a before and after changed.

can16358p: How would this play with mobile apps?I'd love to see an agent doing work, then launching app on iOS sim or Android emu to visually "use" the app to inspect whether things work as expected or not.

mohsen1: playwright can do all of that too. I'm confused why this is necessary

falcor84: I read it in the same vein as saying that a sub's sonar enables "seeing" its surroundings. The focus is on having a spatial sensor rather than on the qualia of how that sensation is afterwards processed/felt.

jillesvangurp: Exactly. We need more tools like this. With the right model, picking apart images and videos isn't that hard. Adding vision to your testing removes a lot of guess work from ai coding when it comes to fixing layout bugs.A few days ago I had a interaction with codex that roughly went as follows, "this chat window is scrolling off screen, fix", "I've fixed it", "No you didn't", "You are totally right, I'm fixing it now", "still broken", "please use a headless browser to look at the thing and then fix it", "....", "I see the problem now, I'm implementing a fix and verifying the fix with the browser", etc. This took a few tries and it eventually nailed it. And added the e2e test of course.I usually prompt codex with screenshots for layout issues as well. One of the nice things of their desktop app relative to the cli is that pasting screenshots works.A lot of our QA practices are still rooted in us checking stuff manually. We need to get ourselves out of the loop as much as possible. Tools like this make that easier.I think I recall Mozilla pioneering regression testing of their layout engine using screenshots about a quarter century ago. They had a lot of stuff landing in their browser that could trigger all sorts of weird regressions. If screenshots changed without good reason, that was a bug. Very simple mechanism and very effective. We can do better these days.

philipp-gayret: > If the tool can identify issues and improvements (...)Tools like Claude and the like can, and do. This is just a utility to make the process easier.

alkonaut: This would be _extremely_ valuable for desktop dev when you don't have a DOM, no "accessibility" layer to interrogate. Think e.g. a drawing application. You want to test that after the user starts the "draw circle" command and clicks two points, there is actually a circle on the screen. No matter how many abstractions you make over your domain model, rendering you can't actually test that "the user sees a circle". You can verify your drawing contains a circle object. You can verify your renderer was told to draw a circle. But fifty things can go wrong before the user actually agrees he saw a circle (the color was set to transparent, the layer was hidden, the transform was incorrect, the renderer didn't swap buffers, ...).

boomskats: I find the official Chrome DevTools MCP excellent for this. Lighter than Playwright, the loop is shorter, and easy to jam into Electron too.

m00dy: try deepwalker, https://deepwalker.xyz

m00dy: Gemini on Antigravity is already doing this.

jillesvangurp: Something like OpenAIs agent mode where it drives a mouse and keyboard but against an emulator should be doable. That agent mode is BTW super useful for doing QA and executing elaborate test plans and reporting issues and UX problems. I've been meaning to do more with that after some impressive report I got with minimal prompting when I tried this a few months ago.That's very different from scripting together what is effectively a whitebox test against document ids which is what people do with things like playwright. Replacing manual QA like that could be valuable.

onion2k: That's exactly what Playwright does, but also something you don't really need in order to debug a problem.

EruditeCoder108: I see

theshrike79: I've also had Claude run javascript code on a page using playwright-cli to figure out why a button wasn't working as it should.

bartwaardenburg: This is a good point. For anything without a DOM, screenshot diffing is basically your only option. Mozilla did this for Gecko layout regression testing 20+ years ago and it was remarkably effective. The interesting part now is that you can feed those screenshots to a vision model and get semantic analysis instead of just pixel diffing.

dbdoskey: This is really cool. Have you thought of maybe accessing the screen through accessibility APIs? For Android mobile devices I have a skill I created that accesses the screen xml dump as part of feature development and it seems to work much better than screenshots / videos. Is this scalable to other OS's?

msephton: It's trivial in Xcode Simulator, for Apple platform coverage.

sd9: I've always found screenshots on PRs incredibly helpful as a reviewer. It helps ground yourself on what's been done. Historically I've had mixed success getting my team to consistently add screenshots to PRs, so this tool would be helpful even for human code.At work, we've integrated claude code with gitlab issues/merge requests, and we get the agent to screenshot the UI changes for anything it's done. But it occurs to me that we could use the same workflow to screenshot (or in this case, host a proofshot bundle of) _any_ open PR. So not automated code reviews, which are tiresome, but more like a helpful comment with more context. You would just get the agent to check out any PR, review what features changed, get proofshot to play around with it, then add that as a comment.Going to try out proofshot this week, if it works like it does on the landing page it looks great.