Percy Visual Testing — Plugin for AI Coding Agents

Visual review loop for agentic UI development. Works in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, GitHub Copilot, and any AI IDE that reads AGENTS.md.

⚠️ Beta — this plugin is in beta. Capabilities, commands, and behavior may change; feedback welcome via GitHub issues.

When an agent changes UI code, this plugin makes sure a Percy build runs, the diffs are checked against the agent's stated intent, and the change is rejected + iterated on if real bugs are found — all without leaving the editor.

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Install

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add percy/percy-visual-testing-agent
/plugin install percy-visual-testing

Cursor · Codex · Antigravity · Gemini (Code Assist agent mode or CLI) — any IDE that reads AGENTS.md (all major agents do). One command, run in your repo:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/percy/percy-visual-testing-agent/main/install.sh | bash

GitHub Copilot — same command with --copilot (adds the /percy-* slash commands to Copilot Chat):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/percy/percy-visual-testing-agent/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --copilot

QA / regression-suite repo (your automation suite lives in its own repo and you triage scheduled runs) — add --qa (combine with --copilot if you use Copilot):

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/percy/percy-visual-testing-agent/main/install.sh | bash -s -- --copilot --qa

The installer only touches your repo: skills → .percy/skills/, a short section appended to your AGENTS.md, a one-line GEMINI.md pointer (created or appended — Gemini reads GEMINI.md by default, not AGENTS.md), and (with --copilot) prompts → .github/prompts/. Prefer manual? Copy those files from this repo — that's all it does.

Outside Claude Code/Copilot (Cursor, Codex, Antigravity, Gemini Code Assist agent mode in VS Code, Gemini CLI — any AGENTS.md IDE) there are no /percy-X slash commands. Ask in plain words ("run the percy setup workflow"), or say: read .percy/skills/percy-X.md and follow it.

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Setup — one command

/percy-setup

One command to start — new to Percy, it walks you through account, token, and first baseline (~5 minutes, a few confirmations). Setup detects where your project is and routes you:

• No Percy yet? It offers to integrate right there (installs the SDK, wires config, inserts your first percySnapshot() calls).
• No baseline yet? It walks you through approving your first build.
• Already running Percy? It verifies access, hooks the workflow into your repo's agent instructions, and you're done.

You'll need your project's PERCY_TOKEN in the environment (Percy dashboard → project settings) — setup checks for it and tells you exactly what to do if it's missing. Never paste tokens into the chat. Approving/rejecting builds additionally uses your BrowserStack username + access key; setup covers that too.

What the plugin sends. Every Percy API call carries a User-Agent like percy-visual-testing-agent/0.4.6 (agent=copilot-vscode; channel=install-sh-copilot; role=qa; skill=gate; install=3f9c2a1e) curl/8.7.1 — which coding agent, which workflow, and a random per-repo id. No names, emails, tokens or repo names.

MCP is optional. The plugin talks to Percy's REST API directly — no MCP server required. If you already use the BrowserStack MCP server, the plugin will happily use it where it helps.

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Start here

New to Percy — no visual tests yet. Install → /percy-setup → say yes when it offers to integrate. The agent installs the right Percy SDK for your test framework, inserts the first percySnapshot() calls (with your approval), runs the first build, and helps you approve it as the baseline. From then on you're in the loop below. Growing coverage later is one command per file: /percy-expand-coverage <test file>.

Already using Percy. Install → /percy-setup → done. From now on, when you (or your agent) change UI code and open a PR: the intent gets written into the PR, the Percy build is watched automatically, every diff is reviewed against your intent + code, and the merge is gated — approvals become a one-line confirm, real bugs get fixed in a bounded iterate loop, and only the genuinely ambiguous cases ask for your eyes.

Got an open PR with a Percy build already? Run /percy-gate directly — it backfills intent from your PR diff and gives you a verdict on the existing build in ~2 minutes. No rebuild needed.

Coming from Applitools or toHaveScreenshot()? /percy-migrate translates your existing checks.

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Workflow

(one-time)  /percy-integrate           ← wire Percy into an existing test suite
(as needed) /percy-expand-coverage     ← add percySnapshot() to a test file
   ↓
agent edits UI code
   ↓
/percy-visual-intent          ← adds intent section to PR description
   ↓
Percy build runs (CI / /percy-run-build / manual)
   ↓
/percy-review                 ← polls, classifies diffs against intent + code context
   ↓
/percy-gate                   ← rejects + iterates if real bugs found (≤3 loops)
   ↓
visually clean → merge

You only ever run /percy-gate — /percy-review is its engine; don't run both.

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Skills

Skill	Purpose
/percy-setup	Verify creds + paid tier, register project, detect baseline (cold-start) state
/percy-integrate	Wire Percy into a project with tests but no visual coverage — install SDK, config, first percySnapshot() calls
/percy-expand-coverage	Analyze a test file, propose + insert percySnapshot() at uncovered touchpoints
/percy-migrate	Migrate from Applitools or in-house screenshot testing (Playwright/Cypress golden files) to Percy
/percy-visual-intent	Agent drafts visual intent from session, presents for review/edit, injects into PR description
/percy-run-build	Kick a Percy build locally
/percy-status	Read latest build state for current branch
/percy-watch	Background-watch a Percy build (or its GitHub PR check) and auto-invoke /percy-gate on completion
/percy-review	Poll → fetch AI summary → classify diffs vs intent
/percy-gate	Enforce reject + iterate loop on real bugs (and symmetric auto-approve on clean)
/percy-troubleshoot	Diagnose Percy problems — percy doctor + local probes, common-failure table, live docs lookup

Full instructions: AGENTS.md.

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In CI & regression runs

Local setup is step one — day-to-day, Percy runs in CI. The token moves with it: PERCY_TOKEN becomes a CI secret (GitHub → Settings → Secrets → Actions), exposed on the test step (env: PERCY_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.PERCY_TOKEN }}). /percy-setup offers to wire this into your existing workflow.

Two kinds of builds, two behaviors:

• PR builds — the full loop: intent → watch → review vs intent + code → gate → fix-iterate.
• Regression runs (default branch / scheduled / no PR) — the intent is accumulated from the PRs merged since the last approved baseline: the plugin re-reads the ## Percy Visual Intent sections it wrote into those PRs, so legitimately-merged changes are expected, not noise. Every diff is then classified as matches a merged PR's intent (cited), dynamic noise (via snapshot history), or a genuine anomaly — and the gate switches to triage: one confirm approves an all-explained run; anomalies are surfaced with deep links for investigation (no code-fix loop — the cause is a deploy/data/env, not this working tree).

No access to the app's code? Central QA teams testing vendors' apps often can't read the app repos. /percy-setup records that (change_context: percy-only), and the triage then explains changes from the vendor's release notes or a Jira release if you have them, otherwise from Percy's AI and snapshot history alone: Percy-flagged bugs are still caught, consistent design changes are grouped as "looks deliberate — approve if it was in the release", and anything else is left for your eyes.

Two things to know: verdicts are sharpest when the app team's PRs carry Percy Visual Intent sections — without them, the plugin matches each change to a PR by its code change (and, failing that, its description) and says which one it used. And today the triage runs in an interactive IDE session — a scheduled headless recipe (cron + agent CLI posting the triage to Slack, human clicks stay human) is on the roadmap.

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Iteration policy

/percy-gate auto-iterates up to 3 times, stopping early if:

• Bug count isn't decreasing (delta gate).
• Session snapshot budget exhausted (default 50, configurable via PERCY_SNAPSHOT_BUDGET).

In v1, every reject and approve decision is confirmed by the human before Percy is actually called. Both actions go to the same /reviews endpoint with the same auth (BROWSERSTACK_USERNAME + BROWSERSTACK_ACCESS_KEY) — only the action value differs. Auto-approve is gated to fully-clean builds only (zero likely-bug, unplanned-change, needs-human, flaky-test, or asset-capture-issue verdicts), and is disabled in NO-AI / NO-INTENT degraded modes.

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Status

v0.3 — Percy-AI-native, REST-first. The plugin talks directly to https://percy.io/api/v1/ using PERCY_TOKEN. It will switch to Percy MCP once these beta gaps are fixed in browserstack/mcp-server:

• percy_get_ai_summary returns change clusters but not per-region visual_quality data — plugin currently walks per-comparison to get region-level signal.
• percy_approve_build supports reject underneath but the docs don't yet surface the action (tracked upstream).
• No dedicated paid-tier signal — plugin infers from ai-details.total-comparisons-with-ai > 0.
• No light-payload poll endpoint — plugin polls /builds/{id} directly.

Verdict model

The plugin produces per-comparison verdicts (not per-cluster, not per-snapshot — regressions can be in any single comparison):

Verdict	Meaning	Plugin action
✅ expected	Region matches stated intent, OR change_reason reads benign/dynamic, OR no code change touches the surface	pass
🛑 likely-bug	Percy flagged irregularity, change_reason reads unintended, and it doesn't match intent (or violates "unchanged")	recommend reject + iterate
⚠️ unplanned-change	A real code-backed change exists, Percy didn't flag it as a bug, but it isn't in stated intent	flag for human review
🔁 likely-flaky-test	Snapshot history shows recurring incomplete-render captures	don't reject; recommend fixing the test wait condition
⚙️ asset-capture-issue	Percy network-logs flag asset-capture failures for the diff's images	don't reject; surface Percy Snapshot Debug
🙋 needs-human	Genuinely unresolvable from Percy text + code context + intent	surface verbatim reasoning + dashboard link for a ~30-sec human call

Percy-AI-native (v0.3). The verdict logic runs entirely on Percy's AI text outputs reconciled against the developer's code context. Two reasons:

1. Percy already encodes the signal in text. Each flagged region carries change_reason — Percy's own judgment, e.g. "deliberate CSS color change… not a dynamic variation" vs "could be an unintended CSS regression". Percy's classifier has already examined the rendered output and written down what it found, so reasoning over that text plus code context works directly from Percy's own conclusions.
2. Percy-native signal. Percy's per-region change_reason / change_description / visual_quality_reason come from Percy's own visual classifier — a richer, more specific signal than anything a downstream generic pass could reconstruct. The plugin is built around it.

The strongest false-positive filter is code context. If Percy flags a region but no code change in the git diff touches that surface, it's almost certainly dynamic content / fixture variance — not a regression the developer introduced.

Intent ↔ region matching is the agent's job (semantic reasoning). The plugin doesn't do Python keyword matching — it gathers Percy's data + code context and asks the host agent to reason.

Cluster-level bug promotion: if any comparison in a cluster has visual_quality: irregularity, all comparisons in that cluster inherit the bug flag. Percy's AI can flag the same defect in one comparison of a cluster but not another. Promotion corrects for this.

By-design human fallback

A residual of cases can't be settled from Percy's text + code + intent. These are routed to human review (needs-human), never silently misclassified:

• /percy-gate surfaces Percy's change_description + visual_quality_reason verbatim + the dashboard deep-link.
• Human confirmation is required before Percy reject (v1 human-in-the-loop); the verdict is a recommendation, not a unilateral action.

Degraded modes

The plugin has four operating modes:

1. Full mode — Visual Intent provided + AI coverage on all comparisons. Produces per-comparison verdicts (expected | likely-bug | unplanned-change | needs-human | likely-flaky-test | asset-capture-issue). /percy-gate can auto-reject + iterate (excluding the flaky/asset/needs-human tiers, which don't trigger reject).
2. NO-INTENT degraded mode — AI coverage present but no Visual Intent doc. Produces candidate-bug | unverified-change labels only. /percy-gate will NOT auto-reject. Strong prompt to run /percy-visual-intent first.
3. Cold-start mode — no approved baseline yet (first build, or a fresh/upgraded baseline awaiting approval). /percy-review detects this and explains it ("this build is the baseline — approve it; the next build gets real diffs + AI") instead of returning a confusing NO-AI result.
4. NO-AI degraded mode — Percy AI genuinely didn't process the build (free tier, browser pool config, etc.). Surfaces all changed snapshots with dashboard links. /percy-gate will NOT auto-reject.

The NO-INTENT gate matters: without a stated intent the plugin cannot reliably distinguish intentional changes from regressions, so it refuses to auto-reject in that mode rather than flag intentional work.

v0.2 known MCP gaps

These need to be added to browserstack/mcp-server for the plugin to switch from REST-direct to MCP-primary:

• percy_get_smart_debug — wrap GET /api/v1/network-logs?comparison_id=<id> (currently used directly by the plugin for asset-capture detection)
• percy_get_snapshot_history — wrap GET /api/v1/snapshots?project_id=<id>&filter[name]=<n> (currently used directly for flaky-test detection)
• Existing gaps from v0.1: per-cluster bug verdict in percy_get_ai_summary, explicit reject action in percy_approve_build, dedicated paid-tier signal, light-payload poll endpoint