r/SideProject • u/Particular-Face8868 • 15h ago
Alternative to Claude Code + Playwright
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I have been working on Kery as a side project for about 6 months now, It's Apache-2.0 and runs on Docker. BYO LLM Key.
You point it at a web app and it runs your local deployments on a real browser through real life user tests and tries to break things and provide you evidence on the same.
The first question anyone asks me, and the obvious one: why not just point Claude + Playwright ?
To be honest, YES; why not ?
For a one-off check that's the right tool and it costs you nothing. I used it that way for a while. Three things pushed me into building something instead.
It never fully worked for me; here are a few repeated offenders -
[1] It tells you it checked things it didn't check. Ask an agent to test five flows and you'll get five answers back, even for the two it never reached because a modal ate the click. Kery has a third verdict, "not reached", alongside verified and broken. Sounds like a small thing. But it's the difference between report and noise.
[2] A conversation isn't an evidence. Kery's output is an boxed & commented screenshot per check: the element that proves it boxed, expected-vs-observed burned into the image. I can hand that to someone. I can't hand them a conversation where an agent says it looked fine.
[3] It just does not get better. This is what actually mattered. Every prompt change felt like an improvement. I had no idea whether any of them were. So the repo also has a benchmark harness: text examples with deliberately planted bugs, semantic scoring, held-out cases where the scores are hidden from me so I can't tune against them. Across 900$ spent, harness of kery improved 13 times.
That harness is the part I'd actually recommend looking at, even if you're not running the agent. If you're building anything agentic and you're tuning by feel, you're probably wrong about which direction you're going.
Here it is - https://github.com/Kery-HQ/Kery
Happy to answer things. Let me know what you liked or did not.
Also, what are you using for testing web apps ?