u/Maxl-2453

I am so tired.

We had a huge engineering push to build an internal component library using native Web Components. Architecturally, the devs love it. For me? Every single standard input, dropdown, and button is now encapsulated inside a Shadow Root.

Traditional locators literally bounce off the Shadow DOM. To interact with a simple text field that I can clearly see with my own two eyes on my monitor, I have to write deep traversal scripts, piercing through multiple shadow boundaries just to dispatch a keyboard event. I spent three hours today debugging a failing script, only to realize a dev wrapped a button in a new web component and hid it from the light DOM.

It feels completely backwards. I am fighting the architecture of the application just to verify that a button clicks.

Has anyone successfully detached their testing from the DOM tree entirely? I just want my test to look at the screen and click the button without needing a map of how the engineers packaged the code.

Retention at day 7 was bad. Not catastrophically bad but bad enough that it became the only thing we talked about in every meeting for two months. We redesigned the home screen, rewrote the empty states, added tooltips, ran three different onboarding experiments. Nothing moved the number in any meaningful way and that specific feeling of doing a lot of work and seeing nothing change is its own particular kind of exhausting

A friend who does mobile consulting looked at our session recordings for an hour and asked us one question. He asked what our app does when a user comes back after 3 days and their session has expired. We showed him. The app opened to a white screen for about 4 seconds then redirected to login. On a fast connection this was barely noticeable. He pulled out his own phone, throttled the network to simulate a normal commute connection and opened the app. White screen for 11 seconds then a crash

Every user coming back on a slower connection, which is most users, most of the time, on a train or in a building with weak signal, was hitting an 11 second white screen followed by a crash as their reengagement experience. We had built our entire retention strategy around bringing people back to something that was silently crashing them out on the devices and connections they actually used. The redesigns were fine. We had just never tested the re-entry experience on a real network in a real environment

I am losing my mind over how useless our test suite feels right now because we just pushed a new AI summary feature that generates a quick text breakdown for users but since the length of the text is completely unpredictable it ended up pushing the main container down and overlapping the checkout button on mobile.

The crazy part is that our entire Playwright suite passed perfectly because the DOM node for the checkout button was technically still there and clickable by the script so the pipeline stayed green while our actual live users were staring at a mangled mess where they physically could not click the button to pay us.

It just feels like we are completely blind to actual visual bugs because our tools only care about the HTML underneath so I am really curious how you guys are handling dynamic AI content right now because brute forcing DOM selectors is clearly not catching these layout breaks.