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Show HN: Finalrun – Spec-driven testing using English and vision for mobile apps

21 points by ashish004 ago | 7 comments
I wanted to test mobile apps in plain English instead of relying on brittle selectors like XPath or accessibility IDs.

With a vision-based agent, that part actually works well. It can look at the screen, understand intent, and perform actions across Android and iOS.

The bigger problem showed up around how tests are defined and maintained.

When test flows are kept outside the codebase (written manually or generated from PRDs), they quickly go out of sync with the app. Keeping them updated becomes a lot of effort, and they lose reliability over time.

I then tried generating tests directly from the codebase (via MCP). That improved sync, but introduced high token usage and slower generation.

The shift for me was realizing test generation shouldn’t be a one-off step. Tests need to live alongside the codebase so they stay in sync and have more context.

I kept the execution vision-based (no brittle selectors), but moved test generation closer to the repo.

I’ve open sourced the core pieces:

1. generate tests from codebase context 2. YAML-based test flows 3. Vision-based execution across Android and iOS

Repo: https://github.com/final-run/finalrun-agent Demo: https://youtu.be/rJCw3p0PHr4

In the Demo video, you’ll see the "post-development hand-off." An AI builds a feature in an IDE, and Finalrun immediately generates and executes a vision-based test for it verifying the feature developed by AI.

gavinray |next [-] 

  > The shift for me was realizing test generation shouldn’t be a one-off step. Tests need to live alongside the codebase so they stay in sync and have more context.
Does the actual test code generated by the agent get persisted to project?

If not, you have kicked the proverbial can down the road.

ashish004 |root |parent [-]

Yes gavinray, It gets persisted to the project. Its lives alongside the codebase. So that any test generated has the best context of what is being shipped. which makes the AI models use the best context to test any feature more accurately and consistently.

avikaa |next |previous [-]

This solves a massive headache. The drift between externally generated tests and an active codebase is a brutal problem to maintain.

Using vision-based execution instead of brittle XPaths is a great baseline, but moving the test definitions to live directly alongside the repo context is definitely the real win here.

Did you find that generating the YAML from the codebase context entirely eliminated the "stale test" issue, or do developers still need to manually tweak the generated YAML when mobile UI layouts change drastically? Great project!

ashish004 |root |parent [-]

Hi Avikaa, finalrun provides skills that you can integrate with any IDE of your choice. You can just ask the finalrun-generate-test skill to update all the test for your new feature.

sahilahuja |next |previous [-]

Agentic testing. Kudos to your decision to open-source it!

ashish004 |root |parent [-]

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arnold_laishram |next |previous [-]

Looks pretty cool. How does your agent understand plain english?

ashish004 |root |parent [-]

We have built a QA agent that can understand your plain english intent and uses vision to reason and navigate the app to test your intent. You can check our benchmark here https://finalrun.app/benchmark/ and how we architected our agent for the benchmark https://github.com/final-run/finalrun-android-world-benchmar.... Its all open source

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rootally7 |next |previous [-]

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arbaaz |previous [-]

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