We removed the sandbox page from this site. The reason is simple: we are a small lab, attention is our scarcest resource, and a list of projects we don't actively maintain sends the wrong signal. A sandbox may return someday — as our own labeled prototypes. Not now.
We took the sandbox page down this week. If you visited it before, you’d have found two experiments listed — one of ours, one submitted from outside the lab. It looked harmless. We let it sit for months. Then we asked the question we should have asked on day one: does anything on that page represent what this lab is working on right now?
No. Not one item. So instead of pruning it entry by entry, we removed the whole page.
Why
UZEN Labs is small. Four active product lines, and that is already more work than a lab this size can comfortably carry. The binding constraint is not ideas, and it is not tools. It is attention.
A sandbox that collects other people’s projects, or our own half-finished ones, costs attention in both directions. To a visitor, it dilutes what we actually build — a stranger’s submission ends up listed next to products we ship updates for. To us, every listing is a small tax: it has to be checked, judged, and kept honest, forever. Add a submission form on top and you invent a review job nobody here signed up for.
The bar for what appears on this site is now one sentence: actively maintained by this lab. Everything that fails it goes.
What happens to the old submissions
Nothing dramatic. They are not archived anywhere public. If you submitted something, this is not a verdict on your project — it is a verdict on our page. We would rather link nothing than vouch for something we do not use ourselves.
Will the sandbox come back
Maybe. A focused gallery of our own prototypes — clearly labeled, actually running, built by us — could earn its place someday. Community submissions, probably never in that form.
Not now, though. What is in front of us is concrete: polishing ZensInk’s workflow engine, growing LiteInk’s template line, keeping the Onchain Diary research archive deep, and shipping the next Revolutio quarterly.
That is more than enough work for a lab this size. Doing fewer things and finishing them is the whole strategy.