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Show HN: Magnitude – open-source, AI-native test framework for web apps

(github.com)
179 points anerli | 1 comments | 25 Apr 25 17:00 UTC | HN request time: 0.255s | source

Hey HN, Anders and Tom here - we’ve been building an end-to-end testing framework powered by visual LLM agents to replace traditional web testing.

We know there's a lot of noise about different browser agents. If you've tried any of them, you know they're slow, expensive, and inconsistent. That's why we built an agent specifically for running test cases and optimized it just for that:

- Pure vision instead of error prone "set-of-marks" system (the colorful boxes you see in browser-use for example)

- Use tiny VLM (Moondream) instead of OpenAI/Anthropic computer use for dramatically faster and cheaper execution

- Use two agents: one for planning and adapting test cases and one for executing them quickly and consistently.

The idea is the planner builds up a general plan which the executor runs. We can save this plan and re-run it with only the executor for quick, cheap, and consistent runs. When something goes wrong, it can kick back out to the planner agent and re-adjust the test.

It’s completely open source. Would love to have more people try it out and tell us how we can make it great.

Repo: https://github.com/magnitudedev/magnitude

1. o1o1o1 ◴[26 Apr 25 09:09 UTC] No.43802033[source]▶
Thanks for sharing, this looks interesting.

However, I do not see a big advantage over Cypress tests.

The article mentions shortcomings of Cypress (and Playwright):

> They start a dev server with bootstrapping code to load the component and/or setup code you want, which limits their ability to handle complex enterprise applications that might have OAuth or a complex build pipeline.

The simple solution is to containerise the whole application (including whatever OAuth provider is used), which then allows you to simply launch the whole thing and then run the tests. Most apps (especially in enterprise) should already be containerised anyway, so most of the times we can just go ahead and run any tests against them.

How is SafeTest better than that when my goal is to test my application in a real world scenario?