I would like to easily be able to invert a test. Look at the tests for what this actually does, or if you want a very AI generated description:

Feature request: fails support in testActor

The use case

Sometimes a scraper relies on a platform-side behaviour that can silently stop working (e.g. sending an undocumented API intent token that Facebook used to honour but no longer does). When that happens, a test that was asserting correct behaviour starts failing. The desired response is:

1. Acknowledge the regression — don't just delete or skip the test.
2. Keep a sentinel in CI that will alert you if the behaviour resumes, so you can re-enable the full assertion.

The current workaround is to manually invert every assertion with .not, add a prose comment explaining the inversion, and rename the test with a warning in the title. That's fragile and easy to misread.

What Vitest already provides

Vitest has test.fails(). A test wrapped with it is expected to throw/fail. If it does fail, the suite reports it as passed. If it unexpectedly passes, the suite reports it as failed — exactly the sentinel behaviour we want. The symmetry with test.skip() / test.todo() makes the intent immediately legible to any Vitest user.

Why it can't be used today

testActor is the only public entry point for platform tests, and internally it calls:

vitestTest.runIf(shouldRun)(name, options, async (context) => { … });

vitestTest.runIf(condition) returns a plain callable; you can't chain .fails() onto it. So consumers have no way to reach vitestTest.fails.runIf(shouldRun)(…) without bypassing testActor entirely — which means losing the build-pinning logic, the run() helper, and the annotate calls.

Proposed change

Add an optional fails flag to ActorTestOptions (which already extends Vitest's TestOptions, so the pattern is familiar):

export type ActorTestOptions = Omit<TestOptions, 'retry'> & {
    retry?: TestOptions['retry'];
    /**
     * Mark this test as expected to fail (wraps the underlying vitest test with `test.fails`).
     * The test passes as long as it keeps failing, and alerts you (by failing) if it starts passing.
     * Use this to keep a sentinel for known regressions without inverting assertions by hand.
     */
    fails?: boolean;
};

Then in testActor in lib.ts, swap the test function based on the flag:

const vitestTestFn = options.fails
    ? vitestTest.fails.runIf(shouldRun)
    : vitestTest.runIf(shouldRun);

vitestTestFn(name, options, async (context) => { … });

vitestTest.fails is itself a full TestAPI object (same shape as vitestTest), so .runIf() is available on it and the rest of the body is unchanged.

What the call-site then looks like

testActor(
    ACTOR_ID,
    'Newest sorting works for posts that do not expose it in the UI',
    async ({ expect, run }) => {
        // … run actor …
        expect(results[0]?.profileName).toBe('Leif Andersson');
        expect(results[10]?.profileName).toBe('Pål Kvitberg');
    },
    { fails: true }, // Facebook stopped honouring REVERSE_CHRONOLOGICAL_UNFILTERED_INTENT_V1
                     // for posts that don't advertise it. Remove `fails` when it works again.
);

The assertions stay in their natural (positive) form, the inversion is expressed as a single structured option rather than spread across comments and .not calls, and any Vitest user reading the test immediately understands the intent.