Playwright and Chroma Replace Postman for 20x Faster RAG Memory Testing

A developer at a RAG-based assistant product discovered a critical memory bug after a user reported the assistant forgot a peanut allergy mid-conversation. The root cause was a legacy API endpoint overwriting freshly stored memory — a path that manual Postman tests had never covered. The existing workflow, which involved manually sending fixed conversations and inspecting Chroma via Jupyter notebooks, was slow, incomplete, and impossible to reproduce reliably under pressure. To fix this, the team replaced manual testing with an automated end-to-end pipeline combining Playwright as a real browser driver and a direct Chroma client for vector store verification. The new setup runs entirely in local or CI environments via a single pytest file, cutting one test cycle from over five minutes to a fraction of that time.