Selenium vs Playwright vs AI testing: hybrid stacks are what survive real QA flows
kimjoshe8 · reddit · 2026-10-27
The author argues AI testing tool demos only shine on trivial flows (login, click, assert), while real QA pain lives in 27-step checkouts, legacy iframes, auth expiring mid-run, cross-service test data, CI-only 12s requests, and arcane business rules.
His read: Selenium survives on familiarity, Playwright is the cleanest modern default, and AI tools make sense where the bottleneck is writing/maintaining/exploring tests rather than execution. The pragmatic setup is hybrid — an AI layer for authoring and self-healing (he cites TestMu KaneAI), a CLI to verify real browser flows, and Playwright for deterministic code you fully control. "AI replaces automation" is less realistic than AI-assisted automation. He asks what stacks actually survive readers' ugly flows.
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