9lives – Self-healing test runner that refuses to mask real bugs (

QualityMax launched 9lives, a self-healing test runner that automatically fixes broken Playwright, Cypress, and Selenium tests by repairing drifted selectors without masking real bugs. The tool uses offline selector repair and optionally leverages existing coding-agent subscriptions like Claude Code, aiming to reduce CI failures and developer toil in the coding-agent era.

Your tests have nine lives. Self-healing QA for the coding-agent era, by QualityMax https://qualitymax.io . A coding agent renamed a button, the test went red, 9l heal read the live page, fixed the locator, re-ran it green, and showed the diff — no API key.Run the demo yourself → Your coding agent shipped a change and your Playwright test went red? Don't rewrite it — resurrect it: 9l heal login.spec.ts 9l runs the test, classifies the failure, and heals it in tiers: Tier 1 — offline, free, instant. Selector drifted? 9lives finds the element again from the failure-time page snapshot text, testid, id, class, aria-label and rewrites the locator. No LLM, no network, no account. Tier 2 — the subscription you already pay for. Structural change? 9lives shells out to your installed coding-agent CLI — Claude Code — so your existing subscription does the thinking. No API key to mint, nothing to configure: if the CLI is logged in, healing works. Prefer raw API? claude -p , Codex codex exec , or OpenCode opencode run ANTHROPIC API KEY / OPENAI API KEY work too. Always a diff, never a surprise. Healed code is shown as a unified diff and applied only when you approve or --yes in CI . Won't hide your bugs. A failing assertion means the app's behavior changed — not that a selector moved. 9lives refuses to rewrite assertions to force a green that's how naive auto-healers mask regressions and flags it as a possible real bug instead. Opt in with NINELIVES HEAL ASSERTIONS=1 if you really want it to propose an assertion update. curl -sL 9lives.run | sh pip install 9lives or: uv tool install 9lives Requires Node.js ≥ 18 Playwright itself runs on Node . Check your setup with 9l doctor . 9l run <spec run a spec locally; screenshots/videos/traces in .9lives/ 9l heal <spec run → heal → re-run → diff → apply on confirm 9l heal <spec --yes CI mode: apply automatically, exit code tells the story 9l watch dir heal on save — polls specs, heals whatever changes 9l report brittle-selector report from your local heal history 9l mcp serve heal test/run test as MCP tools for coding agents 9l doctor environment check Works inside an existing Playwright project uses your package.json or on a bare .spec.ts file scaffolds an ephemeral project automatically . All commands accept multiple specs/globs. The heal verb is framework-agnostic. 9l heal auto-detects the framework per spec — .cy.js / .cy.ts or a package.json depending on cypress runs through Cypress , .py specs run through Selenium via your own pytest , everything else is Playwright. Force it with --framework cypress|selenium|playwright . 9l heal cypress/e2e/login.cy.js runs npx cypress run in your project 9l heal tests/test checkout.py runs your pytest + selenium Same loop everywhere: classify → Tier 1 offline selector repair → Tier 2 via your subscription → re-run → diff → approve. Cypress's Expected to find element: \ x and Selenium's NoSuchElementException payloads both carry the failing selector, and both are correctly treated as selector drift — never as assertion failures Cypress wraps locator misses in AssertionError ; 9lives sees through that so the behavior-vs-drift guard doesn't misfire . 9lives never scaffolds a Cypress project or a Python env — those specs run against your own install. Your agent wrote code, a test went red — let it heal the test in-loop instead of waiting for CI. 9l mcp speaks MCP over stdio zero extra dependencies and exposes two tools: heal test run → heal → verify → return the diff; apply: true writes it in place, otherwise a .healed copy is saved for review and run test . Claude Code claude mcp add 9lives -- 9l mcp or without installing first: claude mcp add 9lives -- uvx --from 9lives 9l mcp // Cursor .cursor/mcp.json / Codex — any MCP host with stdio servers { "mcpServers": { "9lives": { "command": "9l", "args": "mcp" } } } The behavior-vs-drift guard applies to agents too: a failing assertion comes back as needs-human , with an explicit note that forcing it green would mask a real bug. heal test only accepts existing test files under the directory 9l mcp was started in NINELIVES MCP UNRESTRICTED=1 lifts this , since healing a spec ultimately executes it. 9l watch makes healing part of the edit-save loop: it polls your specs no OS-specific watchers, works everywhere and runs the heal loop on whatever changed. --yes applies automatically. 9l watch tests/ --yes As a pre-commit https://pre-commit.com hook — heal or just run changed specs before they ever reach CI: repos: - repo: https://github.com/Quality-Max/9lives rev: v0.2.0 hooks: - id: 9lives-heal heals drifted selectors in place; assertion failures still block - id: 9lives-run strict variant: run only, never modify Every heal appends a line to .9lives/history.jsonl next to the spec — locally, never uploaded. 9l report aggregates that history into a brittle-selector report: which selectors keep breaking, which anchor testid/id/text/class keeps re-finding them, and what to pin instead. 9l report terminal table, worst selectors first 9l report --md brittle-selectors.md - uses: quality-max/9lives/action@v1 with: specs: "tests/ / .spec.ts" anthropic-api-key: ${{ secrets.ANTHROPIC API KEY }} commit-healed: "true" Runs on your runner, heals with your key, posts a 🐾 report comment on the PR, and can commit healed specs straight back to the branch. See action/ /Quality-Max/9lives/blob/main/action/README.md . Your subscription: an installed claude / codex / opencode CLI is auto-detected and used for Tier 2, so the subscription you already use for coding can heal tests too. Or your key: ANTHROPIC API KEY / OPENAI API KEY . Force a choice with NINELIVES PROVIDER claude-code , codex , opencode , anthropic , openai and NINELIVES MODEL . Your runner: everything executes on your machine or your CI. Nothing leaves it, nothing phones home. No account. Ever, for anything in this tool. Tier 1 healing is fully offline and never sends anything anywhere. Tier 2 builds its prompt from the failing test plus the page snapshot captured at failure . If you heal tests against a site you don't control, that page content becomes model input. In subscription mode it is handed to your local coding-agent CLI claude / codex / opencode , which can run tools — so a hostile page could attempt prompt injection against your agent. 9lives runs the CLI in an empty scratch directory to limit blast radius, but if you heal against untrusted targets, force plain API mode no agent tools with: NINELIVES PROVIDER=anthropic or openai 9l check — map your git diff to affected user flows, run/generate targeted tests: "did my agent break anything?" 9lives-action — GitHub Action that posts the QA report on PRs, healed commits included 9l gen <url — crawl a live app and generate a starter test suite v0.1 prototype — built by QualityMax https://qualitymax.io for local, BYO self-healing Playwright workflows. MIT licensed.