FAQ

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Does this run in production?

No, and it is built so that it cannot easily be made to. Keep reticle.connect() behind a dev guard; the SDK is side-effect-free and tree-shakes out of production builds. The Vite plugin uses apply: 'serve', which means it is not part of a production build at all.

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Do I have to change my components?

No, for look, act and observe. You get DOM, network, console and routing with zero changes. You get considerably better results by adding data-testid attributes and by emitting signals. That is the difference between a verdict that says “something appeared” and one that says “the app declared success”.

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Does it work without React?

The core is framework-agnostic: DOM, network, routing, console, animations, snapshots and actions are gated against a vanilla TypeScript app. Support beyond that is uneven, and we would rather say so than let you find out:

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Can it tell me whether my UI looks good?

No. Reticle verifies behaviour, not aesthetics. Visual correctness and “does this feel right” remain a human job, or a visual-diff tool’s. It does read design tokens. reticle_inspect reports whether a colour came from your theme or from someone’s clipboard. But that is a consistency check, not taste.

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Does it replace Playwright or Cypress?

No. Those are your scripted CI suite. Reticle is for in-loop verification while an agent is coding, and for the flows you never got round to automating. They compose.

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How does it compare to Playwright MCP or Chrome DevTools MCP?

Those drive a separate browser from the outside. Reticle verifies your own running app from the inside, with your real session and auth, and with assertions and regression as first-class. Measured on the same app: Reticle caught 10 of 10 injected bugs, Playwright MCP 9, Chrome DevTools MCP 8. DevTools MCP is about 7% cheaper per look on a simple page, and more expensive on a real one.

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Can I run several apps or tabs at once?

Yes. Each is a session. Pass sessionId to any tool when more than one is connected, and reticle_sessions lists them. Reticle scopes to your project and prefers the active tab, and it refuses rather than guesses when the choice is ambiguous. A refusal you can act on beats a silent pick of the wrong tab.

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Why did I get verified: "unknown" on something that clearly worked?

Because Reticle could not confirm it saw the whole story, and it will not call that a pass. The most common cause is a throttled tab: a backgrounded browser tab has its timers suppressed, which suppresses the quiescence detection used to decide the page has settled. Focus the tab, or drive a dedicated context. If you believe an unknown is wrong, report it. Reticle’s own response says as much: “an unknown verdict is our defect, not yours”.

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Does my data leave the machine?

Your app’s data, no. Reticle is dev-only, localhost-only and offline. Credential-shaped values are redacted before they leave the page. You will see [REDACTED] in request bodies without configuring anything. Anonymous usage telemetry is sent separately and can be turned off with reticle telemetry disable.

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Is Reticle proven to make agents fix more bugs?

No, and we are not going to claim it. A controlled test of fix-rate did not show an improvement. The benchmark was confounded in ways we can point at, and we consider the question open. What is measured is detection: 10 of 10 injected regressions caught, with zero false alarms on a known-good control, against 9 and 8 for the alternatives.

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Why are there 48 tools but only 18 in my agent?

MCP re-sends every advertised tool definition on every turn, so the tool list is rent rather than a one-time cost. Measured: 18 tools is about 5,400 tokens per turn; all 48 is about 33,600. The other 30 are one call away via reticle_tools and reticle_run.