why not a playwright plugin ?

[amk-dev]

I was thinking, why build a seperate shortest api that have to be implement from scratch instead of building this as something people can plugin to already existing playwright instances

• tried a poc for the concept of shortest as a playwright plugin, it is pretty trivial to implement
• imo the value prop of shortest is not another e2e testing framework, its ai powered QA
• in that case extending playwright with ai capabilities can deliver more value to the user
• they can use all the battle tested testing goodness people usually expect from playwright
• and in the future shortest doesnt even have to be exclusive for playwright, packages like shortest/vitest / shortest/jest everything can exist ( they don't even have to be e2e )
• modular, easy to plugin, and shortest dev team can focus on delivering value that did not exist previously ( all the ai stuff ), instead of reinventing a lot of wheels ( hooks / showing test results / running failed tests / snapshots etc etc )

in this demo, i write two tests, and use a playwright feature test.only that's very common in all the testing frameworks. just as a test. there will be so many features like this that people might expect. also all the community tools that comes with playwright, shortest can use right away.

shortest-playwright-plugin-poc.mp4

[slavingia]

Eventually shortest should replace playwright, that's the goal! But if this helps get mindshare, would be great

[amk-dev]

Eventually shortest should replace playwright

💯

But if this helps get mindshare, would be great

• absolutely. imo a plugin might be more likely to enter production codebases initially

logistics

• we can have a @antiwork/shortest-plugin-playwright package that is just this plugin
• or with the current package, we can have a path that imports the plugin, @antiwork/shortest/plugins/playwright, quiet long but it's a start

Note:

this is the POC i showed in the demo.

https://github.com/amk-dev/shortest-playwright-plugin-poc

[amk-dev]

I'll polish the demo, and show a usable demo, does that work ?

[slavingia]

Solid! Could we just do "shortest" without the .ai?

[amk-dev]

if there's any way, Will do it. Let me see