Use case
Run a smoke test on a deploy in about a minute
Breadth, not depth: is this deploy fundamentally working?
A smoke test answers one question after a deploy: is the site fundamentally working? Load the page, click through the main navigation, and look for broken links, layout breakage, console errors and failed requests. ZeusQA runs that as a single prompt in about a minute and returns a pass, fail or blocked verdict with evidence.
What belongs in a smoke test
Breadth over depth. A smoke test touches many things shallowly to prove nothing is catastrophically broken. If it takes longer than a couple of minutes, it has stopped being a smoke test and become a regression suite.
- The page renders at all, and the primary call to action is present.
- Main navigation goes where it says it goes.
- Nothing 404s or redirects somewhere unexpected.
- The console is clean, and no request came back 4xx or 5xx.
The prompt
Open the page, verify it renders correctly, click through the main navigation, and report broken links, layout problems, console errors and failed network requests.
Two narrower variants worth keeping around:
Collect every link in the main navigation and footer with computer.elements(), open each one, and report any that 404, redirect somewhere unexpected, or come back with console errors. Come back to the start page between links.
Load the page, wait for it to settle, scroll to the bottom and back. Then report everything computer.diagnostics() found: console errors, uncaught page errors and failed or 4xx/5xx requests, with the URL of each failing request.
Pass, fail and blocked are three different answers
- Pass — every named check was answered and passed.
- Fail — a check was answered and did not pass.
- Blocked — the run could not reach a state where the check was answerable: a login wall, a geo-block, a bot challenge. That is information, not a failure, and it is reported separately so it does not pollute your pass rate.
What a script would have missed
A page that renders perfectly while the console fills with exceptions and /api/profile quietly returns 404. Every run collects console errors, uncaught page errors and failed responses whether or not the prompt asked for them, so this surfaces as a finding rather than as a mystery three weeks later.
Settings that matter
- Model — a fast model (Claude Haiku 4.5, GPT-5.6 Luna) is fine for a flow you run often. Reach for a deeper model when a run keeps getting stuck on the same step.
- Devices — laptop is enough for a first pass. Add phone when the flow is mostly used on mobile.
- Step budget — 30 scripts covers most flows. Raise it for long, multi-page journeys.
- Reasoning effort — passed straight through to the model. Higher effort costs more and thinks longer before acting.
What the report gives you
- A verdict: pass, fail or blocked.
- Named checks, each marked passed or not, so you can see what was actually asserted.
- Findings rated critical, high, medium, low or info, with the evidence behind each one.
- A screenshot for every step, and one session video for the whole run.
- Console errors, uncaught page errors and failed or 4xx/5xx requests, collected automatically.
What this does not cover
Worth knowing before you point it at something important.
- No scheduling. ZeusQA does not run this for you every five minutes — a run is something you start.
- No CI trigger and no CLI today.
- No uptime alerting. If you want a check on a schedule, use a monitoring tool alongside this.
Questions
- Can I run this automatically after every deploy?
- Not yet. There is no scheduler or CI integration. You start a run from the app.
- How long does a smoke test take?
- The worked example on our home page finished in 46 seconds over six scripts, with 8 of 8 checks passing. Longer flows and slower models take longer.
- What is the difference between fail and blocked?
- Fail means a check did not pass. Blocked means the run could not get far enough to answer the check, for example behind a login or a bot challenge.
Try it on your own site
Paste a URL, describe the flow in plain English, and watch a real browser do it. Five runs free, no card.