Ask HN: What's the worst part of web E2E testing?

Hi everyone!

I'm a front-end engineer with ~10 years of experience, but also a quality freak. I always end up becoming the testing evangelist at every company I join, taking up the task of cleaning up the test architecture and fighting for quality. Thanks to this "hobby," I've had my fair share of writing e2e tests using various frameworks (Codeception, Cypress, Playwright), but I've never felt satisfied.

To me, it feels like we are trapped between two extremes: platforms that demand building an enterprise-grade test pyramid, and a bunch of no-code/low-code AI tools that promise magic but just dumb down the process and produce unmaintainable garbage.

This has led me to start a side project to see if I can find a better way to tackle these common pain points. To help me get a clearer picture for my project, I want to know if I'm the only one seeing this. I'd appreciate it if you could share your thoughts on the following:

- Why are we stuck in a loop of brittle tests? One small UI change, and locators start breaking everywhere. Should we just accept this fragility as the price for E2E testing, or are we doing something fundamentally wrong?

- Why do AI testing tools treat us like we're dumb? The choice seems to be between a shallow assistant that only covers the happy path or a black box that says, "just trust me." As a professional, I want to think, solve hard problems, and do the job an AI can't. Where are the tools that augment expertise instead of replacing it with a superficial outcome?

- How can we keep test code clean and scalable? There are awesome patterns like the Page Object Model or theScreenplay Pattern, but they require a huge upfront time investment and software design skills. Most of the teams I worked with didn't even know them or didn't want to walk the extra mile. They usually just copy-paste test code until it becomes unmaintainable, and then stop testing for good.

Apart from this "questionnaire" I would also love to hear any stories, anecdotes, and just your overall feeling about the state of e2e testing and your relation with it.

Thanks in advance for your time and insights!