22.2Already Arrived (2026 — no longer "future")

First-Party Test Agents

Playwright's planner / generator / healer shipped (v1.56+) and matured through 1.61. The plan → generate → heal loop is now the reference workflow, portable across agent runtimes via init-agents. Cypress answered with cy.prompt() natural-language authoring in v15. The commercial platforms (testRigor, mabl, KaneAI, Applitools, Testim, Functionize) all market the same shape as "agentic execution."

What's still open: review discipline. The tooling generates; the industry is still working out how teams review, own, and version agent-generated suites without drowning.

AI-Powered Locators

Arrived from several directions at once:

• Intent APIs — Stagehand's act("click the submit button") resolves natural language to actions per-run
• Snapshot refs — Playwright CLI's YAML snapshots address elements by role/name, no CSS authoring
• Momentic-style intent-based locators resolved at runtime in commercial tools
• Appium's Inspector now suggests locators with AI assistance on mobile

The #1 maintenance burden — hand-authored CSS selectors — is genuinely dissolving. Ambiguity handling ("the button" when there are five) remains the weak spot across all of them.

Network Interception via Standards

The BiDi network module is real: WebDriver BiDi now covers ~70% of the CDP surface across Chrome and Firefox. On the Playwright side, HAR capture folded into tracing (v1.60), making network evidence a default artifact of every agent run.