If you're an SDET or a frontend engineer, you know the drill.

You're sipping your morning coffee when a Slack alert pops up: "CI Build Failed: E2E Tests" . You open GitHub Actions, download the 150MB trace.zip artifact, run npx playwright show-trace , wait for the UI to load, click through the timeline, dig into the network tabs, and finally spot the 500 error or the missing DOM element.

Then — because it's 2026 and we use AI for everything — you copy the error log, grab a snippet of the HTML, and paste it into Claude or ChatGPT: "Why did this fail?"

It's tedious. It's manual. It's exactly the kind of repetitive work AI was supposed to eliminate.

The problem? LLMs can't natively read a binary trace.zip .…