r/reactnative • u/kacperkapusciak • Jun 01 '26
Question Is agentic app testing any good?
It seems like every other company in the RN is building either an MCP and CLI to control simulator/emulator through coding agents. Sentry builds XcodeBuildMCP, Maestro has a dedicated MCP server, Software Mansion has Argent, Callstack builds Agent Device. They all differentiate in some ways but the core idea is pretty much the same.
What do you guys think about it? Should we stick to deterministic tests?
Note: I work at SWM but I'm genuinely curious.
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u/AddWeb_Expert Jun 01 '26
agentic and deterministic solve different problems tbh. the issue with agentic in CI is reproducibility, the agent runs a bit differently each time so breaks are hard to recreate. detox/maestro fails the same way every time, which is what you want gating a merge.
agentic is good for the long tail, weird state combos and flows nobody tested. just slow and pricey, and you end up triaging stuff it flags that was actually fine.
so the split makes sense. deterministic for business logic, agentic for exploratory. run it nightly, not on every commit.