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The agent sandbox removes the one step an autonomous agent can’t take: signing up. An agent that knows nothing but the Zinc hostname can mint its own sandbox key in a single unauthenticated call, place a test order, and watch it deliver — no account, no dashboard, no human. When it’s time to go live, a human claims the sandbox into their real Zinc account and the agent’s key keeps working.
That’s the whole prerequisite. The response carries a zn_test_ key, a complete example order body, and a URL a human can use later to adopt the sandbox.

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Why it works this way

Every other path to an API key assumes a person: a signup form, an email confirmation, a dashboard visit. An agent evaluating whether it can buy something has none of those, and asking it to stop and wait for a human is what kills the integration before it starts. So the funnel is inverted. The agent proves the integration works first, against sandbox data that costs nothing and risks nothing. The human shows up only at the end, to decide whether to adopt it — and adopting it doesn’t invalidate anything the agent already built.
The mint response doubles as documentation. Agents read the bytes they get back, not a docs site, so every field they need to proceed — the key, a valid order body, the ordered next steps — is in the response itself.

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The shape of it

1

Mint

One unauthenticated POST. Returns a sandbox key, an example order, and a claim URL.
2

Build

Place sandbox orders, watch the real lifecycle on a compressed clock, and rehearse every failure mode against magic product URLs.
3

Claim

Hand the claim URL to the human you work for. The sandbox — order history and key — folds into their Zinc account.
4

Go live

They fund a wallet and mint a live key. The agent swaps one string. Nothing else changes.

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What a sandbox key can and cannot do

A minted account is provisional. It has no wallet and needs none: sandbox orders skip funding entirely. It isn’t a signup either — no email required, nothing sent, no live account created.
Sandbox keys expire after 7 days without use, and everything they created is sandbox data that’s deleted with them. Any use resets the clock, so persist the key across runs rather than minting a fresh one each time.

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Who this is for

  • Agent builders — get to a working order in the first session, decide later whether to open an account.
  • Platform and framework authors — ship a Zinc integration your users can try with zero configuration.
  • Anyone evaluating Zinc — exercise the real API surface, including the failure paths, before talking to us.
If you already have a Zinc account, you don’t need any of this: mint a zn_test_ key in the dashboard and read Sandbox & Testing instead. The agent sandbox exists for the case where there’s no account yet.

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Where the docs live

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Next steps

Quickstart

Zero to a delivered sandbox order in about two minutes.

Going Live

Claim the sandbox and swap in a live key.