# Flow-Next Drive

Source: https://flow-next.dev/skills/flow-next-drive/

Surface-aware UI automation - detects the surface (web app, Chromium-backed desktop app, or true-native app) and picks the best available driver, degrading gracefully.

The `flow-next-drive` skill drives **any UI surface** the way a real user would - a web app, a Chromium-backed desktop app (Electron / Windows WebView2), or a genuinely native app (macOS AppKit/SwiftUI, or a webview exposing no CDP), driven via the **Cua Driver** (MIT, provider-agnostic, background) / Computer Use, with a **Cua Sandbox** rung for headless/CI native runs. It detects the surface, picks the highest available driver on a ladder, and degrades gracefully when a richer driver is absent.

It is a *router*, not a single driver. The default rung - Vercel’s `agent-browser` CLI - is the only driver assumed present; every other rung is detected and optional. A pass succeeds with whatever the environment actually has: most cloud VMs, Linux, and CI have no Computer Use, so it is never a hard dependency and never on a headless/no-display path.

The full ladder (surface detection, the universal flow, the web rungs, the native rung with its install and permission steps, and how it degrades) is in [Live-app QA & driving UIs](https://flow-next.dev/guides/live-qa/).

## When to use it

* Verifying a deployed UI change matches the spec.
* Driving or testing a web app, an Electron / WebView2 desktop app, or a native desktop app.
* Reading documentation that has no clean text version.
* Capturing baseline screenshots before a redesign.
* Logging into a service and pulling structured data.
* Light e2e probes that do not warrant a full test framework.

It orchestrates drivers - it does not reimplement them. The full native-desktop QA *workflow* (scenario authoring, bug filing, verdict) is a downstream `/flow-next:qa` concern; this skill provides the driver/actuation + the surface conditional.

## Dynamic usage

Recipes that compose with drive in the [cookbook](https://flow-next.dev/guides/cookbook/):

* [Evidence-first](https://flow-next.dev/guides/cookbook/#evidence-first) - drive is how [QA](https://flow-next.dev/skills/qa/) captures live-app evidence instead of narrating it.
* [Integration tricks](https://flow-next.dev/guides/cookbook/#integration-tricks) - the surface-detection ladder works for your own automation prompts, not just QA.

***

*Driver ladder and universal-flow structure inspired by Ray Fernando’s [`running-bug-review-board`](https://github.com/RayFernando1337/rayfernando-skills) skill (Apache-2.0).*