Cypress Tips August 2025
AI or no AI, newsletters, conferences
cy.prompt: yes or no? 🤖
I have been looking into using LLMs for day-to-day coding. As you see from my recent presentations like “Productive E2E Test Writing Using GitHub Copilot“, the trick it to know when to use LLMs and how to check their work.
Recently, I saw Cypress-the-company announcing the new “AI-driven” cy.prompt command:
In a nutshell: you replace individual Cypress commands with a single block of text
Should you try / use this new cy.prompt command? If you ask me:
NO
Let me rephrase it:
Definitely “NO”
You are replacing your local testing code with ambiguous, fuzzy natural language text that is no longer linted, syntax-highlighted, uses 3rd-party libraries, etc. You are surrendering executing YOUR tests on YOUR cloud with delegating the test logic to Cypress Cloud and its “LLM” black box.
No. Simply don’t. What happens if you stop using Cypress Cloud? Will you correctly map the “prompt” text into standalone Cypress or other test commands? Do not surrender clear tests to the fuzzy natural language prompts that you do not know how to execute.
Newsletters 🗞️
Here is a list of web development and testing newsletters I subscribe to:
I read these newsletters selectively to stay up-to-date on the latest tools and developments. And of course, you should subscribe to my “Cypress Tips & Tricks” letter
Conferences 🗣️
Aug 19th online Testmu conference (free) with "Network Control for End-to-End Web Testing" presentation showing cypress-magic-backend plugin 💻
Sept 29th-Oct 2nd in New York City at iJS New York 🏙️
in-person version of "Network Control for End-to-End Web Testing" presentation
in-person workshop "Hands-on Web Testing with Cypress And Playwright"
Nov 14th TokyoTestFest in person presentation "Codeless AI Test Automation Makes Me Code A Lot" 🇯🇵
New videos 📺
Do you have a complicated testing scenario and not sure how to write a Cypress test? If there is no existing recipe at https://glebbahmutov.com/cypress-examples, then feel free to ask me to create one. I love solving real-world problems.
Soccer Glory ⚽️🏆🏆
I am happy to report that after 3 years of trying, our in-town team “Cambridge United” U14 has won both the July and August New England Revolution 4v4 tournaments hosted at Gillette Stadium.
If you want to know what it takes: 2 months of practices, 3 times a week, each practice was at least 1.5 hours. It took playing against U15 players through the heat and humidity, mandatory individual practices for every player - but I can honestly say we are the strongest non-club team in New England! We will try to play next year, but we will have to play up in the U16 group, which will be much harder. So we are enjoying the celebration this summer, while we can.
Update: I collected the newsletters and added more links in this blog post https://glebbahmutov.com/blog/useful-newsletters/