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Comment by theshrike79 | Hacker News Reader

What does this do that playwright-cli doesn't?

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli

Maker here. Playwright is great, I use it too. The difference is really about who’s driving. ProofShot is meant for agents that just need shell commands, start to open the browser and begin recording, exec to interact with the page, stop to bundle everything up. You get video, screenshots, console errors, server logs, and an interactive HTML viewer in one artifacts folder you can drop on a PR with proofshot pr. With Playwright the agent needs to write a test script, run it, collect screenshots, parse output separately… it’s a lot of glue code. Also agent-browser’s element references are ~93% smaller than Playwright’s accessibility tree, which adds up when you’re paying per token.

> With Playwright the agent needs to write a test script, run it, collect screenshots, parse output separately… it’s a lot of glue code.

It most certainly does not require any glue code. Playwright cli gives you basically all of this out of the box.

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli?tab=readme-ov-fi...

ProofShot isn’t a Playwright alternative, it’s built on agent-browser (from Vercel Labs), which is a different runtime. The value isn’t “can control a browser” — playwright does that fine, and in fact agent-browser is built on top of Playwright, hence so is ProofShot :) The value is bundling video + screenshots + console errors + server logs + action timeline into a single viewer.html and uploading it to the PR. That’s what saves me review time. If your workflow doesn’t need that bundle, playwright-cli works great.

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

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

If coding agents are given the Playwright access they can do it better actually because using Chrome Developer Tools Protocol they can interact with the browser and experiment with things without having to wait for all of this to complete before making moves. For instance I've seen Claude Code captures console messages from a running Chrome instance and uses that to debug things...

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.

Because LLM users are NIH factories?

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

I think playwright doesnt capture video, right?

It does. I literally just watched a video of a Playwright test run a few minutes ago.

Yes it does. https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-cli?tab=readme-ov-fi...

I'm pretty sure OP wrote their own version of playwright because they didn't know this existed.

Yeah I’ve never seen it capture video before, but if you specify in your `AGENTS.md` that you want to test certain types of workflows, it will take progressive screenshots using a sleep interval or by interacting with the DOM.

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