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

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21–30 of 45 posts

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

#21
post #20

Does it only work for node projects? Can I run it against a Staging environment without mixing it with my project?

You can run it against any URL, not just node projects! You'll still need a skeleton node project for the actual Magnitude tests, but you could configure some other public or staging URL as the target site.

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

#24
post #13

> 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. I've been recently thinking about testing/qa w/ VLMs + LLMs, one area that I haven't seen explored (but should 100% be feasible) is to have the first run…

So this is a path that we definitely considered. However we think its a half-measure to generate actual Playwright code and just run that. Because if you do that, you still have a brittle test at the end of the day, and once it breaks you would need to pull in some LLM to try and adapt it anyway. Instead of caching actual code, we cache a "plan" of specific web actions that are still described in natural language. Fo…

Did you consider also caching the coordinates returned by moondream? I understand that it is cheap, but it could be useful to detect if an element has changed position as it may be a regression

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

#25

Bang me sideways, "AI-native" is a thing now? What does that even mean?

It definitely means something, probably an app designed around being interacted by with an LLM, upon first hearing it. Browser interaction is one of those things that is a great killer app for LLMs IMO.

For instance, I just discovered there are a ton of high quality scans of film and slides available at the Library of Congress website, but I don't really enjoy their interface. I could build a scraping tool and get too much info, or suffer and use just clicking through their search UI. Or I could ask my browser tool wielding LLM agent to automate the boring stuff and provide a map of the subjects I would be interested in, and give me a different way to discover things. I've just discovered the entire browser automation thing, and I'm having fun have my LLM go "research" for a few minutes while I go do something else.

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

#27
This is pretty much exactly what I was going to build. It's missing a few things, so I'll either be contributing or forking this in the future.

I'll need a way to extract data as part of the tests, like screenshots and page content. This will allow supplementing the tests with non-magnitude features, as well as add things that are a bit more deterministic. Assert that the added todo item exactly matches what was used as input data, screenshot diffs when the planner fallback came into play, execution log data, etc.

This isn't currently possible from what I can see in the docs, but maybe I'm wrong?

It'd also be ideal if it had an LLM-free executor mode to reduce costs and increase speed (caching outputs, or maybe use accessibility tree instead of VLM), and also fit requirements when the planner should not automatically kick in.

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

#29

This is pretty much exactly what I was going to build. It's missing a few things, so I'll either be contributing or forking this in the future. I'll need a way to extract data as part of the tests, like screenshots and page content. This will allow supplementing the tests with non-magnitude features, as well as add things that are a bit more deterministic. Assert that the added todo item exactly matches what was used…

Hey, awesome to hear! We are definitely open to contributions :)

We plan to (very soon) enable mixing standard Playwright or other code in between Magnitude steps, which should enable doing exact assertions or anything else you want to do.

Definitely understand the need to reduce costs / increase speed, which mainly we think will be best enabled by our plan-caching system that will get executed by Moondream (a 2B model). Moondream is very fast and also has self-hosted options. However there's no reason we couldn't potentially have an option to generate pure Playwright for people who would prefer to do that instead.

We have a discord as well if you'd like to easily stay in touch about contributing: https://discord.gg/VcdpMh9tTy

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

#30

Hi, this looks great! Any plans to support Azure OpenAI as a backend?

Hey! We can add this pretty easily! We find that Gemini Pro 2.5 works the best as the planner model by a good margin, but we definitely want to support a variety of providers. I'll keep this in mind and implement soon!

edit: tracking here https://github.com/magnitudedev/magnitude/issues/6

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