18.1The 5-Minute Elevator Pitch

Use this for initial screens, hallway conversations, or when the interviewer says "tell me about your approach."

"I've built an AI-augmented test automation framework that uses a coding agent (Claude Code) driving the browser through the Playwright CLI, taught via an agent skill.

The core idea: Instead of writing brittle scripts, we define tests as natural-language plans and let an AI agent execute them through a CLI that drives the Playwright engine. Page state lands on disk as compact YAML snapshots; the agent reads it on demand and interacts with elements by reference.

Why this works: The agent can reason about failures, rediscover elements when the UI changes, and adapt to unexpected states. Traditional tests break when a button ID changes. Our agent re-snapshots the page, finds the button by role and name, and keeps going.

Key numbers: Roughly 4x cheaper in tokens than MCP-based approaches — that's Microsoft's own benchmark (~27k vs ~114k per task), and it's why they now recommend the CLI over their own MCP server for coding agents. Full Playwright actionability and auto-waiting underneath, so reliability isn't traded away.

The trade-off: Non-deterministic execution, but we mitigate this with command logging, archived Playwright traces, and a self-healing strategy where every healer patch is code-reviewed."