Comment by hackgician
Comment by hackgician 9 days ago
Interesting, thanks for the feedback! By "taking the place of Playwright," we don't mean the AI itself is going to replace Playwright. Rather, you can continue to use existing Playwright code with new AI functionalities. In addition, we don't really intend for Stagehand to be used in a test suite (though you could!).
Rather, we want Stagehand to assist people who want to build web agents. For example, I was using headless browsers earlier in 2024 to do real-time RAG on e-commerce websites that could aggregate results for vibes-based search queries. These sites might have random DOM changes over time that make it hard to write sustainable DOM selectors, or annoying pop-ups that are hard to deterministically code against.
This is the perfect use for Stagehand! If you're doing QA on your own site, then base Playwright (as you mention) is likely the better solution
It seems to me like Selenium would have been a more appropriate API to extend from, then. Playwright, despite whatever people want it to be otherwise, is explicitly positioned for testing, first.
People in the browser automation space consistently ignore this, for whatever reason. Though, it's right on their site in black and white.