[joshunrau]

Problem

Outside CI, testing/playwright.config.ts left workers undefined, so Playwright used half the cores. That caused two problems:

• The full suite fails locally at five workers. The API allows 50 logins a minute. From mail.spec.ts:257 onwards tests fail with Login failed … (429): ThrottlerException: Too Many Requests, and each failure restarts a worker that logs in again, so the failures cascade through password-reset, permission-sets and remote-assignments. Three full runs failed at the same test.
• It takes most of a machine. Five browser workers alongside the api, gateway, web and playground dev servers leave little for other work running in parallel.

Change

• The default is now two workers, and still one when CI is set.
• E2E_WORKERS in the root .env overrides both. testing/src/support/env.ts reads it and throws while the config loads on anything but a positive integer.
• .env.template carries the key blank, and testing/AGENTS.md §Running documents the default, the reason and the override. testing-strategy.md points there.

One thing to know about the override: the test:* scripts load .env through env-cmd, whose values win over the shell. So once .env carries the key, even blank, a shell export of E2E_WORKERS is ignored. For a single run, --workers=<n> after the script still works.

Verification

• pnpm test:e2e from the root, with no flags, passes in about 6 minutes. Before this change the same command failed on this machine in three of three runs.
• The resolved workers value, checked by loading the config under each combination: 2 with the key absent, 1 with CI set, 4 with E2E_WORKERS=4 (also with CI set), 2 with a blank key and a shell export of 4, and a thrown error for abc and 0.
• pnpm lint passes and pnpm test:coverage is at 100%.

Exceptions:

• No unit test and no new e2e test. testing/ has no unit tier, and the change is the suite's own configuration; the suite passing at the default is its test.
• CI behaviour is unchanged, so CI does not exercise the new default.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.2 noreply@anthropic.com