Quiz · Inside a Sandcastle
A short knowledge check. Answers are hidden behind callouts so you can self-grade after answering.
1. Which academy layer does a Sandcastle occupy?
The construction layer. Crossplane occupies the composition layer (what should exist), Sandcastle occupies the construction layer (how a new artifact is safely produced), and Pico occupies the behaviour layer (what the resulting entity does at runtime).
2. What are the five construction-layer concerns a Sandcastle addresses?
- Isolated workspaces — the sandbox boundary.
- Repo/branch flow — how work moves in and out durably.
- Tools and permissions — what the engineering agent can and cannot do.
- Agent iteration — the inspect → generate → validate → commit inner loop.
- Artifact boundaries — only committed Git content crosses out.
3. Why is it safe to dispose of a Sandcastle after it finishes?
Because the artifact boundary guarantees that only committed Git content (a branch on the target repository, and optionally a PR) crosses out of the Sandcastle. The workspace, tools, and any agent scratch state are all disposable — nothing engineering-relevant is lost when the sandbox is torn down.
4. If the agent’s inner iteration loop fails validation, what happens next?
The loop repeats inside the Sandcastle: the agent diagnoses the failure and revises the files in the same isolated workspace on the same branch. The surrounding delivery pipeline (PR, merge, GitOps, Crossplane reconciliation) never sees the failed attempts.
5. Why does the Sandcastle course not yet include a runnable Sandcastle lab, and where will one live when it does?
This wave of the course delivers substantive instruction but intentionally defers a runnable Sandcastle lab to a later curriculum-verification wave. When a runnable lab lands it will live as a reusable lab under the repository-root labs/ directory (for example, labs/hello-world-pico-sandcastle/) — the same convention used by Hello Pico and Hello Pico on Kubernetes — so it can be reused across courses.