Diagnosis (reproduced by looping cold-server runs): the recurring
"cold start" failures in the auth/follow specs were a hydration race,
not a Vite dep-reload (the server.warmup config already handles that —
no reload events in the logs). FollowButton is an onClick button, and
Playwright considers it actionable (visible + enabled) before React
attaches the handler on a freshly-navigated page. A click in that
window is dropped (or triggers a native form submit), so the expected
state change never happens — e.g. notifications.test.ts:59 clicked
"Request to follow" with no hydration wait and the button never
flipped to "Requested".
The existing waitForHydration guard was applied per-interaction and so
was easy to forget (test 1 had it, test 3 didn't). Fix it at the
navigation instead:
- add gotoHydrated(page, url) = goto + waitForHydration, documented as
the default for "navigate then interact with a React control"
- use it before every FollowButton interaction in notifications +
social
- consolidate the setProfileVisibility helper (copy-pasted in three
specs, two missing the hydration wait) into e2e/helpers/profile.ts,
built on gotoHydrated
Validation against a fresh Postgres, cold servers: notifications 0/10
failures (was the proven flaker); notifications+social+explore 0/5
(55 tests); planner unaffected (25/25).
Note: two other "cold-start"-attributed flakes are NOT this race and
are out of scope here — planner map-load latency (mitigated by warmup
+ CI retries) and the /explore directory assertion (a local artifact
of the scratch DB accumulating >20 public users; CI's fresh DB stays
under the page size, so it doesn't bite there).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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