19.2"Self-Healing Tests"

What they say: "Do your tests self-heal?"

What they mean: When the UI changes, do tests automatically adapt instead of breaking?

Levels of self-healing:

Level	Mechanism	Example
Basic	Retry with fallback selectors	ID → class → text → CSS path
Medium	Visual matching	Find element by appearance, not code
Advanced	AI reasoning	Agent understands page structure and finds alternative

What you should say: "Yes, in tiers. First, when an interaction fails, the agent takes a fresh snapshot and rediscovers the element by role and accessible name — cheap, handles most cases. Second, screenshot plus page-state reasoning for deeper understanding. Third, Playwright's healer agent replays and patches the failing step — and critically, it's allowed to conclude the app itself is broken rather than forcing the test green. A self-healing system without that terminal state is a bug-hiding machine. That's the question to ask any vendor selling 'self-healing AI.'"