cypress

Raised as a usability problem by 13 people on Hacker News over 6 years (2020–2025), in 5 threads.

People raised many different problems with cypress, but no single problem has yet been raised by 3 people in 3 different months and threads.

Unreviewed issues were grouped by machine: Claude Haiku labelled each comment as a usability complaint, named what it's about and summed up the problem in a line, and a small model grouped similar problems. Nobody has checked them by hand. Expect mistakes.

The newest 12 complaints

API is convoluted and unintuitive to work with2025-08-20
Cypress's non-intuitive async model makes code behave unexpectedly, creating footguns for developers2023-08-01
Hard to generate tests dynamically, such as following links, because of its command model2022-11-09
Architecture poorly explained and no onboarding docs for developers new to JavaScript2022-08-19
Command chaining and assertion queuing are not intuitive, forcing many rewrites2020-12-14
Test runs are miserable and slow when executed in CI2020-12-11
Cannot easily spin up, seed, and tear down a test database like Capybara/Rails2020-12-11
Cy.get errors always fatal, with no alternative way to handle them2020-12-11
Can't select a single test to run2020-12-11
Storing Cypress element references in page objects breaks; must re-query each time2020-12-11
Test-writing model is confusing, clumsy and error-prone, hard to write non-trivial tests2020-12-11
Unclear when to chain commands or use callbacks, so the API feels unintuitive2020-12-11