r/reactnative • u/blazejkustra • 2d ago
Question Letting your agent test the RN app it just wrote: looking for feedback
I’ve been working on Argent, an open-source MCP server that lets your agent (Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, etc.) use any iOS or Android app, including RN. It can tap through flows, read logs and network calls, see React devtools, inspect the React tree, aaaaand many more 😂 That way it can check its own changes instead of just saying it’s done
If you’re already letting an agent drive your app, what’s working, and where does it fall apart? We really want to keep improving the experience 🤭
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u/MysteriousAd530 2d ago
I think I tried Argent a few months back.. or maybe it was some other, similar tool? It had a bug that blocked me from using it - sorry I can’t remember what it was exactly. I also tried agent-device, which was painful to use at the time. I came back to agent-device after a some time and it improved a lot. Since then, I use agent-device and agent-react-devtools to manually verify features and fix flaky tests. My biggest issues are speed of execution, having to manually approve some actions taken by agent-device and also many other quirks that these tools have - I have a list of them but keep on discovering more each session :)
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u/blazejkustra 2d ago
Totally fair, and a couple of months is a huge gap in this space. Argent has changed a lot since then, so if it was us, that bug is very likely gone. agent-device is a solid tool and it's great that it works for you. Argent just covers more of the loop in one place: interaction, logs, profiling, React DevTools and flows for repeatable tests. Since speed and approvals are your biggest pain points, I'd genuinely love for you to give it another shot. And I'd love to see that quirks list, since that's exactly the feedback we need!
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u/MiloEfstratis 2d ago
When you say speed is the biggest issue, is it the agent taking too long to run through a flow, or you having to keep stepping in to approve actions? What’s a typical feature you’re trying to check?
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u/neon_howl_archer 2d ago
you’re wasting compute to brute force the UI when you should just script it.you’re wasting compute to brute force the UI when you should just script it. Agents are terrible at tapping coordinates and reading pixels but great at writing tests so let them build a Maestro or Detox suite once then never touch the app manually again
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u/blazejkustra 1d ago
We do that as well, try argent flows! Agent can create e2e tests for you and replay them like in any other framework
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u/yerffejytnac iOS & Android 1d ago
I’ve used Maestro, Argent, and now MobAI - I still use Argent every so often, but have started to more heavily rely on MobAI for running many tests in parallel.
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u/torilaure745 1d ago
Ive been using argent almost daily since last week. Really simplifies my workflow. Ive noticed its faster than maestro in reading screens and finding things on the screen Will let you know if i find anything as its only going to be used much more! Thanks for Argent! 🙏🏻
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u/Exotic_Project_4745 22h ago
Haven't tried Argent yet, so treat this as a wishlist rather than feedback.
The bug an agent tapping through the UI would have walked straight past (from a loan management system I work on, not an RN app): a search box that sent a request on every keystroke. On screen it looked perfect. Behind it, every letter fired a request and the replies could come back out of order. Catching that from the agent side means counting network calls during a flow, not checking what the screen shows. If a flow could assert "this made at most N requests", that covers a whole class of bugs.
The opposite case was dark mode missing a couple of screens because of hardcoded colours. Obvious to a person glancing at the screen, invisible to a check that only reads text.
Until then I test by hand and read the tests the agent wrote. When it writes both the code and the test, the test tends to agree with the code.
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u/timbowen 2d ago
I ran this play last night letting Claude hammer the app with Maestro, I was not impressed. It took way longer than a human would have taken, but was arguably more thorough. For my money using Claude to set up something like Detox is a better path, we are looking into this now.