First, I want to say that I’m genuinely impressed with what the Retool team has built with the new App Builder.
As a senior React developer and someone who teaches React, I can really appreciate the amount of thought that has gone into the development experience. The guardrails the Retool AI agent provides are valuable, especially compared with just pointing a general-purpose coding agent at a blank repo and hoping it makes good architectural choices.
I also really like that I can have my Claude Code agent look at the Retool-generated source and reason about it, and then effectively have it “talk” with the Retool agent by helping me craft better prompts and review what was generated. That workflow feels powerful.
The area I’m struggling with is testing.
When I build large React apps myself with AI assistance, my normal workflow is that after a feature is built, I ask the agent to also build a regression test for it. That might be Jest, React Testing Library, Puppeteer, Playwright, or whatever fits the feature. The important thing is that once the test exists, I can run it later and know that the app did not accidentally regress.
With the new Retool App Builder, I don’t yet see how that same discipline fits in.
Because the app is primarily built through the Retool AI agent, and because I don’t appear to have the same kind of direct repo/package/test-runner workflow I would have in a normal React project, I’m not clear on where durable automated tests are supposed to live.
For small apps, I can see how manual testing and Retool’s built-in structure may be enough. But I’m building something larger, and my concern is long-term maintainability.
At some point, I expect to turn what I’ve built over to people who may not be senior React developers. I want to make sure they can keep improving the app without accidentally breaking workflows I already built and verified.
So my question for the Retool team is:
What is your thinking around automated testing for larger apps built with the new App Builder?
More specifically:
- Are generated tests on the roadmap?
- Is there a recommended way to add Jest, Playwright, Puppeteer, or similar tests around an App Builder app?
- Should we be thinking of Retool apps as primarily tested through external browser-based tests against a staging URL?
- Is the intended architecture that complex business logic should live outside Retool, in a separately tested service, while Retool owns the UI/workflow layer?
- Are there plans for the Retool AI agent to generate test cases or regression checks as part of feature work?
I’m not asking this as criticism of the product. I’m asking because the App Builder is good enough that I’m now thinking about using it for bigger things. And once an app gets big enough, automated regression testing becomes less of a nice-to-have and more of a core part of how I trust the system over time.
I would love to understand how the Retool team thinks about this, and what best practices you recommend today for teams building larger, longer-lived apps with the new App Builder.
(not sure if this is the right forum to post 
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