I Built a One-Person AI QA Agency Using a Skill File and Local LLM

QAJourney Posted on Jun 1 • Originally published at qajourney.net I Built a One-Person AI QA Agency Using a Skill File and Local LLM # playwright # testing # automation # ai There is a specific failure mode in AI-assisted QA work that most tooling discussions skip entirely, and it shows up earliest when you are working solo on a real engagement. Every new chat session is stateless. You paste the ticket, describe the feature, explain your severity logic, set up the context, and by the time the AI is actually useful, you have rebuilt your methodology from scratch for the third time that week. That is not a workflow problem you fix with better prompts. It is an architecture problem, and the fix is a skill file. QAJourney has a full breakdown of this system at qajourney.net/ai-qa-workflow-for-real-projects, including the actual skill files as free downloads. The short version: a skill file is a context document you load as a system prompt. It carries your test surface tiers, your three-path testing framework, your bug report format, your severity and priority logic, your Playwright conventions, and an explicit definition of what the AI does and does not get to call. Load it once per session. The AI operates inside your methodology from the first message instead of a blank slate. The local LLM layer solves a different problem. On a freelance or retainer engagement, tickets contain real product logic and real client data. Sending that to a cloud API on every session is a data exposure question whether or not it rises to a compliance issue. Running Ollama locally with the same skill file as system context keeps the engagement data on the machine. For the output quality required on QA tasks, current 7B to 14B models are sufficient. The cost at zero marginal per token makes it infrastructure rather than a service you pay by the session. The three-role setup in the workflow: engineer as judgment layer, cloud AI loaded with the skill file for complex reasoning and active