Maybe at a greenfield startup. Where I work this idea wouldn't be entertained for a millisecond.

Many places have "dev", "test" "prod"... but IMHO you need "sandpit" as well.

From an ops point of view as orgs get big enough, dev wraps around to being prod-like... in the sense that it has the property that there's going to be a lot of annoyed people whose time you're wasting if you break things.

You can take the approach of having more guard rails and controls to stop people breaking things but personally I prefer the "sandpit" approach, where you have accounts / environments where anything goes. Like, if anyone is allowed to complain it's broken, it's not sandpit anymore. That makes them an ok place to let agents loose for "whole system" work.

I see tools like this as a sort of alternative / workaround.

Sandpit should be a personal (often local, if possible) dev environment. The reason people get mad about dev being broken for long periods of time is that they cannot use dev to test their changes if your code (that they depend on) is broken in dev for long periods of time.

Agreed on all points. Local loops are faster and safer wherever possible.

But particularly for devops / systems focused work, you lose too much "test fidelity" if you're not integrating against real services / cloud.

There’s no sandpit, only prod and dev, and you’re not allowed to break prod. Your developers work in partitions of prod. Dev is used for DR and other infra testing.

Well that’s just - dumb

Wanna elaborate?

Account vending machines where every dev can spin up thier own account is a thing and still under the control of some type of guardrails.

Hey, I get it. I don't want LLMs on prod at all. I made this to let agents connect to production cloned sandboxes, not production itself. I hope this helps your concerns, but I understand either way. Lmk with any other questions.

What’s a production cloned sandbox? Take my comment as feedback that the landing page is anaemic

For example, if you had an on-prem footprint with thousands of VMs, a production cloned sandbox would be a clone of a VM to let AI safely make changes, install packages, etc.

Yeah, working on the landing page. Feel free to ask any other questions!

why does it have to connect to prod in order to be useful?

I think you would be very surprised at a) how useful it would be and b) how lax prod can be depending on the company culture and stakes.