How Playwright 1.60 Went from a Testing Tool to the Browser Operation Layer for AI Agents

The article argues that Playwright 1.60 has shifted from a testing framework to a runtime for Agents to operate browsers, that Test Agents (planner, generator, healer) have become production-ready, that the MCP server has matured further, and that ARIA snapshots now include bounding boxes. The author breaks this change down into four layers: perception, execution, diagnosis, and roles. ARIA snapshots provide structured page information; browser.bind() lets exploration, the test runner, and MCP share the same browser instance; traces are folded into HAR network capture; and planner, generator, and healer form a closed loop from plan to heal. The article also stresses that the healer does not touch assertions, and that fixes should be submitted as PR diffs for human review rather than merged automatically.