Test automation in 2026 is in a weird place.

On one side, it has never been easier to generate tests. You can ask AI to write Playwright code. You can record flows. You can use no-code tools. You can plug tests into CI and get a demo running pretty quickly. On the other side, a lot of teams still end up in the same place they were five years ago: fragile tests, low adoption, weird CI failures, browser differences, and one poor person maintaining a framework nobody else wants to touch. So instead of writing another generic “best practices...