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Shoot - good call. For anyone reading this: Playwright is a very popular browser automation library.

Developers use it to automate websites, spanning use-cases like QA Testing, Web scraping, Form filling, etc

https://github.com/microsoft/playwright


We did the same thing. It took me a few iterations to get the library right, but overall I used approx 10 billion tokens here across a codex and Claude max plan

The first iteration was a rewrite using codex /goal but it ended up producing junk

The second iteration was fable controlling gpt-5.5 agents to write the code with really strong acceptance tests. This pushed the library in the right direction and is basically what you see here today


This is very cool. We were thinking about doing something very similar with Skyvern

What was the reason you went down this path instead of extending selenium with AI features?


i partially addressed this in the "why vibium" section of the v1 announcement: https://github.com/VibiumDev/vibium/blob/main/docs/updates/2...

but why a new thing vs extending selenium? it's a little complicated, but neither selenium nor playwright were designed with ai in mind from day 1. with vibium, i'm optimizing for "vibe coding" and ai-driven workflows first.


This makes sense. I guess I wanted to understand why starting from scratch was better than "fixing" selenium, but perhaps "fixing" selenium isn't an option?


for the entire testing tools industry, in some ways, selenium was the "final boss" to beat. every new tool had to trash selenium in their marketing. eventually those "hit points" added up. "fixing selenium" is as much as of a branding problem as it is a technical problem. "oh, there's a new version of selenium? i heard selenium sucks!" is actually a problem that has to be dealt with. an entire new generation of coders only know "playwright rules, selenium drools".

of course, i have a new host of problems by going all in with "vibium"... i'm making a huge bet that "vibe coding" is a trend, not a fad. (it could still be a fad! we'll see if this post ages well soon enough!)


Also, as someone on the periphery of Selenium (mostly via WebDriver), some of the challenge is that Selenium has a huge amount of test code already written for it — and making radical API changes would break every test already written for it, and at that point you’re effectively a new library.

It’s gonna be very interesting to watch exactly how the adoption of WebDriver BiDi goes with Selenium, especially once WebDriver Classic starts to go away, and how API stability is balanced with exposing more and more async capabilities.


That makes a lot of sense. Sometimes it's easier to leave the baggage behind. It's too bad..selenium is a masterpiece. Thanks for sharing it with the world



What are some of the risks? This is a public web form available on the IRS website


If you're automating filling out the form, you aren't reading the instructions and you aren't checking what you're putting into it as much as you should be. And if you put in incorrect information, it tends to be considered fraud, even if it's downstream of a sloppy LLM rather than downstream of a particular fraudulent scheme.


You're right, but this is where the LLMs are especially useful. Our customers all prompt it to terminate if it doesn't have the right information / the pre submission confirmation doesn't match


Unrelated, but thoughtful gave us some very very helpful feedback early in our journey. We are big fans!


That's the dream


Definitely. What are your thoughts on the CloudFlare agent identity


It's funny, one time we had a customer that wanted to use us to test their website for bugs..

Skyvern kept suggesting improvements unrelated to the issue they were testing for


So how do clients process this sort of feedback? As a dev, “negative user feedback” gives me scares that “failed behavior testing” does not.

The AI isn’t mad, and won’t refuse to renew. Unless it’s being run by the client of course.

Are clients using your platform to assess vendors?


No, we don't have a lot of usage in that direction. People mainly use us to log into websites and either fill out forms or download files!


We do have them! We are HIPAA compliant, have soc-2 type 2 and offer self hosted deployments


Thank you for responding! Where is your compliance information? How do I sign a BAA?


Send me an email suchintan@skyvern.com - we can get you started


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