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I also think BDD is a really powerful tool for UI acceptance tests! I've now worked on adding it to two AI codebases (one engineered, another vibecoded), and so

by jesol 2mo ago

I also think BDD is a really powerful tool for UI acceptance tests! I've now worked on adding it to two AI codebases (one engineered, another vibecoded), and so far it has been mostly positive. Having non-engineers be able to see what effects their code changes have in the UI is nice; and I find having high level API and UI tests is forcing the first layer of cleanup (standardize access to DB through models/services, and a single API SDK). I am also really interested in standardizing the REST interface with typespec, and the database schema with DBML. I think creating these closed-loops with high-level specs is one of the best ways to make an AI project ownable by a team.

stevefan1999 2mo ago
Yep, I've been experimenting Playwright with CucumberJS and Deno for the last 3 months and it's super effective
skybrian 2mo ago
How are you doing that? Is the Playwright usage a hidden detail or do images appear in the spec?
- jesol 2mo ago
  Basically I'm designing a two layer interface, the first layer speaks app UI specific language and runs playwright directly (signin, dismiss toast, go to dashboard), and then the second speaks product language ("user opens dashboard" in Gherkin would translate to signin, wait for app to load, go to dashboard; for example). The translation from product level language to app level language is the step definition files bddgen uses. I'm building up a little skills library to try and force Claude to stick to these separate levels of abstraction; then also do deduplication and cleanup after implementing new specs. We don't really use images for acceptance testing, it's more functionality. I don't really care where the button is, just that if I click it, it does what it says it does. To that end, we already have multi-tenancy in the application (I highly recommend every app build this in, if only for testing; then you don't need to do the Postgres template1 seeding hacks), so we spin up a tenant for a test, do all the setup with the API (all the Given statements), playwright to do the validation of a feature (the When statements), and finally validation is a mix of Playwright and API (the Then statements). Sorry if that isn't super clear; maybe I could put together a little demo repo or something if people have any interest; I'm hoping to do that after I introduce typespec and dbml (basically spec/{acceptance,api,db}).

by jesol 2mo ago

stevefan1999 2mo ago

Yep, I've been experimenting Playwright with CucumberJS and Deno for the last 3 months and it's super effective

skybrian 2mo ago

How are you doing that? Is the Playwright usage a hidden detail or do images appear in the spec?

jesol 2mo ago
Basically I'm designing a two layer interface, the first layer speaks app UI specific language and runs playwright directly (signin, dismiss toast, go to dashboard), and then the second speaks product language ("user opens dashboard" in Gherkin would translate to signin, wait for app to load, go to dashboard; for example). The translation from product level language to app level language is the step definition files bddgen uses. I'm building up a little skills library to try and force Claude to stick to these separate levels of abstraction; then also do deduplication and cleanup after implementing new specs. We don't really use images for acceptance testing, it's more functionality. I don't really care where the button is, just that if I click it, it does what it says it does. To that end, we already have multi-tenancy in the application (I highly recommend every app build this in, if only for testing; then you don't need to do the Postgres template1 seeding hacks), so we spin up a tenant for a test, do all the setup with the API (all the Given statements), playwright to do the validation of a feature (the When statements), and finally validation is a mix of Playwright and API (the Then statements). Sorry if that isn't super clear; maybe I could put together a little demo repo or something if people have any interest; I'm hoping to do that after I introduce typespec and dbml (basically spec/{acceptance,api,db}).