Show, don't prompt: how QA Wolf turns a recording into a real test

QA Wolf’s recording feature turns a person’s browser walkthrough into a Playwright test, aimed at capturing business rules that are hard to explain in a prompt, such as role-specific controls or conditional approval steps. Before recording, the agent searches the workspace for reusable setup helpers, such as signing in as an admin or creating test data. The user chooses which helpers to run; recording then begins in the live browser. Each action appears in a step list shared by the user and the agent, along with a locator that can find the same element during replay. Capture rules reduce browser noise: typing becomes one step, corrections and scrolling are dropped, duplicate clicks are collapsed, and automatic redirects do not become actions.

The agent can clarify wording, restore a missed action, remove redundancy, reorder steps, and add implied checks, but it cannot invent an action it never observed. To add a missing step, it must locate the element through a browser event. Before code is written, the agent replays the flow in a clean browser: it clears cookies and site data, reruns the chosen setup, and executes actions one at a time. Checks remain in plain language during replay and are converted into code for the finished test. Other steps can be retried up to three times, one second apart, to distinguish slow loading from a broken flow; a click counts as successful if the page has already advanced.