Quickstart

Your first Nitpick run, end to end.

Prerequisites

Follow Install and run nitpick init. Verify with nitpick providers.

1. Crawl your app (one time)

nitpick crawl

Nitpick launches Chromium, logs in as each role, captures auth state, and BFS-explores the navigation respecting exclusions and skipping destructive actions like”Delete” or”Logout”.

Typical time: 2–5 minutes depending on app size.

Produces:

knowledge-base/page-graph.json
knowledge-base/auth/<role>.json

You can inspect what was discovered:

nitpick status

2. Smoke test (recommended before the real run)

nitpick run --scope smoke

Fast P0 check across critical pages: does each page load, any console errors, main heading visible, at least one button.

If smoke passes, your auth + crawler are working. Proceed.

3. Test one page deeply

nitpick run --scope targeted --url /tasks/new

This runs the full pipeline on one page:

Exploration (Junior QA interacts with the page until saturation)
Synthesis (builds the Derived UI Model)
Page Understanding checkpoint (you approve or add context)
Test generation (Playwright tests in tests/)
Test execution
Report

Typical time: 3–8 minutes.

4. Iterative run (daily workflow)

When you change something:

nitpick run --scope iterative --change"I modified the task creation form"

Senior QA will propose affected pages:

─── Change impact proposal ──────────────────────
Based on your description, I think the change affects:
 1. tasks-new (high) "Direct target of 'task creation form'"
 2. tasks-edit (medium) "Same form component likely reused"

Is this correct?
 > 1. Yes, proceed with this scope
 2. Add more pages
 ...

You confirm. Nitpick runs tests on the confirmed pages + smoke-checks everything else.

5. Full regression

Before a release:

nitpick run --scope full

Tests every page in the graph + every configured flow. Plan for 20–45 minutes on a small app.

View the report

open runs/<timestamp>/reports/unified-report.html

Or for Slack/PRs:

cat runs/<timestamp>/reports/summary.md

Your first run, walkthrough of what you’ll see
Cost management, how much this costs and how to control it
Running in CI, non-interactive mode, GitHub Actions