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Ilya Ploskovitov
Ilya Ploskovitov

Posted on • Originally published at debuggo.app

I Spent Months Trying to "Revive" Our E2E Tests. Now I'm Building My Own AI Tool.

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transforming chaos to a structure
​My name is Ilya, and I'm a QA Engineer.
​To be exact, I'm the only QA on my team. You know what that means. I handle regression, new features, talking to devs, and explaining "why this broke again."
​But this isn't a story about starting automation from scratch. This is a story about inheriting it.
​The "Gift" I Got Tired of Fixing
​When I joined the team, I was given a "gift": a big, heavy, and complex automation project.
​"Great," I thought, "at least something is already here. I'll just clean it up."
​Oh, how wrong I was.
​I spent the first few months not testing, but just trying to get this project to run. I updated libraries, rewrote entire modules, and fought with the environment.
​And you know the worst part? Even after all that work, it was still unstable. The main problem was flaky tests.
​Every "red" build in our CI turned into a detective story: is this a real bug, or did a selector just break because the page changed by one pixel?
​Spoiler: 9 times out of 10, it wasn't a real bug. It was just a brittle test.
​I got tired of fixing. My job is to break the product, not to fix the tests.
​"What if...?" (The Idea)
​One day, looking at another "red" build, I realized: as the only QA, I can't afford to spend my time maintaining this brittle system.
​I sat there thinking. We live in an age where AI can write code and explain complex topics.
​Why can't I just ask it:
​"Hey AI. Go to mysite.com/login. Click the 'Login' button. Type 'test@test.com' in the 'Email' field. Check that you see 'Welcome' on the page."
​Why am I hunting for selectors by hand if an AI could "see" the page like a human and adapt to changes?
​Of course, it's not that simple. A "general" AI (like in a chatbot) knows nothing about the DOM, what "click" means, or my specific website.
​But what if I could take those powerful AI APIs and build a "bridge"? Create a service that translates my plain English into actions a browser can understand?
​So, I decided to build it myself
​And that's how Debuggo.app was born.
​For the last 3 months, I've been building this tool alone, in my spare time after my day job.
​Let me be honest: I'm not building my own neural network. I'm a solo developer, not a giant corporation.
​My job is to be an integrator. I take powerful, "general" AI APIs and build smart logic around them. I'm teaching them to understand the context of web testing.
​I'm teaching them how to find buttons even if the id changed, and how to type text into fields even if the layout is tricky.
​My goal is to build a tool that lets me (and you) write automated tests as fast as we write test cases in a notepad.
​Why am I writing this? (I need your help)
​I'm building Debuggo because it's the tool I desperately need in my daily job. I'm building it for myself and for people like me—QAs (or devs) who never have enough time to maintain monster frameworks.
​But I can't build it in a vacuum. As the only QA, I only know my problems. I need to see how it works on your websites.
​I'm opening up the beta.

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