Field notes·28 March 2026 · 8 min read
The week our flaky-test rate dropped from 18% to 2%
Our CI was failing 18% of runs to flakes we'd stopped looking at. One week, four changes, no new tests. Here's what we actually did.
flaky-testscypressci-cd
Our CI was failing 18% of runs to flakes we'd stopped looking at. One week, four changes, no new tests. Here's what we actually did.
Flaky tests don't cost you in CI minutes. They cost you in developer trust. And the compounding interest on lost trust is the most expensive tax in engineering.
I've run production Cypress and Playwright suites in both GitHub Actions and CircleCI for the last year. Here's where each one pulls ahead, where each one tripped me up, and the single factor that should decide it.
The pitch: 'run load tests on every PR.' The reality: you'll have flaky thresholds in three days and disabled tests in two weeks. Here's the four-tier strategy that actually survives.