A Staff SDET's field guide to knowing when to use AI in testing — and the exact prompts to use when you do.
Most "AI for QA" content shows you a shiny demo: paste a requirement, get 20 test cases, applause.
Nobody shows you the moment after that — when the AI hallucinates a login flow that doesn't exist, or generates a Playwright test that passes locally and fails in CI because it never accounted for a loading spinner.
I wrote an earlier article introducing a 7-question framework for deciding whether AI should touch a QA problem in the first place. This is the follow-up I promised: every question turned into a real, copy-paste-ready prompt, with the engineering thinking behind it — the part most "AI + testing" content skips entirely.
If you're a junior QA engineer wondering how to actually use AI on Monday morning without breaking your pipeline, this is for you.
