Comment by jumploops
12 hours ago
This is neat!
Can you elaborate on “boots the app on a simulator or macOS, runs UI automation to verify behavior”
Does this handle screen captures similar to Playwright for web?
I built an app with Codex recently (to control codex/cc remotely, funnily enough) and without any skills/plugins, it was booting the simulator and running tests to verify something(?)
It seemed mostly to ensure that the app didn’t crash in certain scenarios, but it could by no means “see” what was on the screen.
I still had to do all the manual validation myself, mostly around perf/touch targets.
Curious if your tool does that or if there’s another solution out there?
Not the author but it likely means running automated UI tests in the sim, yes. This involves running the app and programmatically selecting and sending interaction events.
Your previous experience was probably the agent running regular unit tests, which obviously don’t need ui environment, but mostly *do* need an iOS runtime, which is why it needs to boot the simulator.
An idiosyncrasy of the way unit tests are executed in Xcode is that they run from the actual app deployment target, and so while running unit tests you’ll also see any app initialisation and background tasks running at the same time. It’s quite a good idea to use compiler directives or launch arguments to disable the usual app setup in the App or App Delegate. Why this isn’t a built in option is beyond me, but it’s definitely confusing behaviour when you’re just running isolated tests!