Meet Sandai

Sandai is the practical coach built into the tools. Wherever you see a sparkles button, Sandai can help — drafting a charter, sharpening a problem statement, turning an assumption into a hypothesis, scoring a RICE item, or synthesizing a loop. New to Sandbox? Hit Quick start with Sandai on the dashboard and Sandai will walk you through standing up your first project.

A coach, not a yes-man

Sandai is there to sharpen your thinking, not rubber-stamp it. It coaches in the spirit of Ash Maurya's Validated Learning Board: start from your riskiest assumption, validate qualitatively (talk to customers) before you verify quantitatively (measure at scale). It favors testable assumptions over opinion, flags risk, and says when something is unknown rather than invent an answer. Treat its output as a strong first draft you edit.

How suggestions arrive

Most Sandai actions return a proposal you review before anything changes: each suggested value appears next to the field it belongs to, and you choose Apply on the ones you want (or Apply all, or Dismiss the lot). Nothing is written into your work until you apply it — your words are never overwritten behind your back.

A few actions are deliberately advice-only — for example Challenge my idea on Next Big Idea, or Split into stories on a Backlog Item. Those exist to push back or open options, so they reply in prose you can copy rather than values to apply. Want to keep the advice around? Add as Note — next to Copy and Copy all — saves it (in whole, or just one section) as a new Note artefact alongside whatever you were working on.

Some actions stay grayed out until you've given Sandai something to work with — hover the button and it tells you what it needs (for example, a stakeholder's Role / relationship before it suggests how to engage). That's deliberate: a coach grounded in nothing would only guess.

If Sandai is unavailable

Sandai needs an AI provider configured. If none is set up, the rest of Sandbox works normally — AI buttons simply show an "unavailable" message instead of failing.

Your data

By default Sandai runs on a cloud AI provider, because project artifacts are working documents rather than sensitive personal data. Self-hosting Sandbox? An operator can switch Sandai to a local model so nothing leaves their server — see the deployment runbook.

Asking about Sandbox itself

Right here on the Help Center, Ask Sandai answers questions about how Sandbox works — grounded only in these articles. If something isn't covered yet, it says so plainly rather than guess. You need to be signed in (and off the waitlist) to use it; your access to any particular project doesn't matter here, since this skill never touches your projects.