Company
Why We Built Shiplight AI
Will
Updated on April 3, 2026
The first version of Shiplight was a cloud-based testing platform for humans. Teams would author tests visually, the platform would handle execution, and results would appear on a dashboard. It worked. Companies used it. QA teams were more productive.
Then AI coding agents took off — and everything we'd built became the wrong shape.
The moment that changed our direction
By late 2025, AI coding agents like Cursor, Claude Code, and GitHub Copilot weren't demos anymore. They were writing production code. Engineers at our early customers were shipping features in minutes that used to take days. Pull requests multiplied. UI changes happened continuously.
But testing hadn't changed at all.
QA teams were still writing Playwright scripts by hand. Still maintaining brittle selectors. Still spending 40-60% of their time fixing tests that broke because a button moved, not because the product was broken.
One of our users told us: "I used to spend 60% of my time authoring and maintaining Playwright tests for our entire web application. Then I spent 0% of the time doing that in the past month." That's when we knew the model had to change — the testing tool needs to be as fast and adaptive as the coding agent producing the code.
What we saw that others missed
Most testing tools in 2025-2026 added AI as a feature. Self-healing locators. AI-assisted test authoring. Smart element recognition. These are useful incremental improvements on the old model.
We saw a different problem: the testing tool was in the wrong place.
When an AI coding agent builds a feature, the verification should happen right there — in the same workflow, in the same session, in the same loop. Not in a separate tool, not in a separate tab, not hours later in CI.
This is why we built Shiplight Plugin. Your AI coding agent connects to Shiplight, opens a real browser, verifies the UI change it just made, and saves the verification as a YAML test file in your repo. The agent that wrote the code also proves the code works.
The three bets we made
1. Tests should be in the repo, not in a platform
Every other testing tool stores tests on their cloud. Shiplight tests are YAML files in your git repo. They get reviewed in PRs. They produce clean diffs. They're portable.
We also built Shiplight Cloud for managed execution, dashboards, and scheduling — but the source of truth is always your repo. You own your tests.
2. Locators are a cache, not a contract
Traditional test automation treats CSS selectors as sacred. Change the selector, the test breaks. Teams spend more time maintaining locators than catching bugs.
We designed Shiplight around a different principle: the intent is the test, and the locator is just a performance cache. When the cache is valid, tests run at full Playwright speed. When a locator breaks, AI re-resolves the element by intent and updates the cache. No manual maintenance.
3. Skills encode expertise, not just actions
AI agents are powerful but they don't know QA best practices. That's why we built agent skills into Shiplight Plugin — structured workflows that guide the agent through verification, test generation, automated reviews across security, performance, accessibility, and more. The agent doesn't need to be a testing expert. The skills provide that knowledge.
Who we are
We're Feng and Will.
Feng built Google Chrome and the V8 JavaScript engine from day one. 20+ years at Google, Airbnb, and Meta working on programming languages, systems, and now agentic AI.
Will spent 12+ years at Meta and Airbnb leading infrastructure, search, developer tools, and ML systems.
We've seen firsthand what happens when development velocity outpaces testing. At every company we've worked at, E2E testing was the bottleneck that nobody wanted to own. We built Shiplight to make that bottleneck disappear.
What's different about Shiplight
| Traditional testing | Shiplight |
|---|---|
| Write tests after development | Verify during development via Plugin |
| Tests break when UI changes | Tests self-heal via intent |
| Tests in a vendor's platform | YAML tests in your repo + Shiplight Cloud |
| Manual test maintenance | Near-zero maintenance |
| Separate QA workflow | Integrated into AI coding agent loop |
| Framework expertise required | Readable by anyone (PMs, designers, engineers) |
Where we are now
Shiplight is backed by Pear VC and Embedding VC. We're in PearX W26.
Companies like HeyGen, Warmly, Jobright, Daffodil, Laurel, and Kiwibit use Shiplight to ship faster without sacrificing quality. We're SOC 2 Type II certified with enterprise-grade security.
If you're building with AI coding agents and want testing that keeps up, try Shiplight Plugin — it's free, no account needed. Or book a demo to see the full platform.
The AI coding era changed how software gets written. We're changing how it gets tested.