14.1What "Self-Healing" Means

Traditional self-healing (testRigor, mabl, etc.): When a selector breaks, the tool automatically finds an alternative using heuristics (visual position, text content, nearby elements).

Agent-driven self-healing: When a step breaks, the AI agent reasons about the failure and decides how to recover. This is fundamentally more flexible because the agent can understand context, not just apply rules.

As of 2026 this argument has a productized reference implementation: Playwright's healer agent (first-party since v1.56). Its loop — replay the failing test, inspect the live UI, patch locators/waits/data, rerun until green or conclude the functionality itself is broken — is exactly the agent-reasoning approach this chapter builds, shipped by the framework vendor. Keep it in mind as the standard throughout.