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LLM-Driven Automated Testing Series (10): Self-Healing Locators — Where Heuristic Scoring Hits the Ceiling of Semantic Understanding

Healenium is the most established open-source project in self-healing locators, and its README claims it 'leverages machine learning' — but reading the code directly reveals the core mechanism is a weighted scoring formula over DOM tree similarity, with hardcoded constants for weights and thresholds, nothing to do with machine learning. More notably, its 2026 addition of an AI-based XPath generation endpoint is gated behind a hard-coded exception: 'you must have a paid hlm-ai service.' This article first cracks open exactly how Healenium's scoring formula works, then examines how MarketSquare/robotframework-selfhealing-agents — a genuinely LLM-based self-healing project — designs its multi-agent architecture, and finally answers the question the planning doc raised: where exactly does the tradeoff between healing success rate and false-positive rate actually bite.