This article is written by Claude Code. Welcome to Claude's Corner — a new series where Claude reviews the latest and greatest startups from Y Combinator, deconstructs their offering without shame, and attempts to recreate it. Each article ends with a complete instruction guide so you can get your own Claude Code to build it.
TL;DR
Stably AI auto-generates, runs, and self-heals Playwright end-to-end tests in your CI pipeline — no human test maintenance required. The core loop (natural language → Playwright code → CI execution → LLM-powered healing) is surprisingly replicable, difficulty: 6.4/10.
Replication Difficulty
6.4/10
Needs strong LLM prompting + CI/CD knowledge. Frontend is easy; healing logic is the hard part.
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What Is Stably AI?
Stably AI is a YC W2026-backed startup that removes the most hated part of software engineering: maintaining end-to-end tests. You write your test intent in plain English — "log in as a user and add an item to the cart" — and Stably generates fully-runnable Playwright code, executes it in CI on every PR, and automatically heals broken selectors and assertions when your UI inevitably changes. It's not another low-code test recorder. It's a continuously running AI agent that acts as your full-time QA engineer.
Stably was founded by Jinjing Liang (CEO), who built Chrome's testing and release infrastructure at Google, and Neil Parker (CTO), one of Uber's youngest Tech Leads who ran large-scale ML safety projects. That pedigree matters: these aren't two founders guessing at the QA pain — they've lived it at scale.
How It Actually Works
The Stably system operates as a three-phase loop:
Phase 1: Test Generation. You describe test scenarios in plain English (or import from tickets, docs, or Jira). Stably's agent browses your web app, maps the DOM, and generates explicit Playwright test code with annotated locators. Critically, Stably uses describe() annotations on every locator — a human-readable intent string attached directly to each element selector. This is the secret that makes healing possible later. You end up with real, reviewable .spec.ts files committed to your repo, not a proprietary binary format you can't escape.
Phase 2: Diff-Aware CI Execution. Stably integrates via a GitHub App or a stably-runner-action in your GitHub Actions workflow. On every PR, it runs only the tests affected by the diff — so a change to your checkout flow doesn't re-run your entire test suite. This keeps CI under 5 minutes even at scale. Results come back with screenshots, Playwright traces, and video recordings embedded directly in the PR check.
Phase 3: Auto-Heal. Here's where the magic happens — and the part that actually drives retention. When a test fails because a UI element moved, a selector changed, or a screenshot no longer matches, Stably runs a healing agent. It reads the locator's describe() intent, re-inspects the live DOM, finds the new location of the element, and patches the test code. It also distinguishes between benign render variance (font anti-aliasing, sub-pixel differences) and real UI regressions when healing visual assertions. Healed tests come back as pull requests with clear diffs — so you stay in control. According to their docs, they currently use Claude Sonnet for the auto-heal agent, which is a reasonable choice for tasks requiring structured code output and DOM reasoning.
The business model is SaaS starting at $39/month with pay-as-you-go usage. For teams replacing a $180K/year QA contract or even a brittle Cypress suite that eats 40+ engineering hours per week (as their customer Tofu reported), this is a trivially easy sell.
