Why your recorded UI tests break after every redesign — and how to build replay that survives

If you've ever recorded a UI test, shipped one button change to production, and watched 40 tests explode in CI — you know exactly why "record and replay" has a bad reputation.

I've spent the past year building a browser testing tool, and I want to talk about the unglamorous engineering that decides whether a recorded test survives a redesign — or dies on first contact. Not the AI magic. The four problems underneath it.

1. A single locator is a single point of failure

Most recorders store exactly one locator per element — an XPath or a CSS chain — and freeze it at record time. That's the root of almost every "my tests broke" story:

XPath like //div[2]/main/section[3]/button[1] breaks when someone adds one <div> to the layout.