For Stakeholders

What this is

A 20-line addition to the pull-request template used internally by the engineering team. It makes an already-existing preview-environment configuration mechanism discoverable, by putting it directly in the description every new PR starts from, pre-filled with the current defaults and inline documentation.

Why it matters (modestly)

The underlying capability — every PR gets its own live, disposable preview of the full application — already existed and already worked. The problem this closes is narrow: contributors who didn't already know the ## 🧪 Sandbox block existed couldn't use it, because there was nothing pointing to it. That's a small friction-reduction change, not a new capability. Expected impact:

• Marginally faster onboarding for new contributors who need a non-default

preview (e.g., testing WhatsApp integration, or a minimal-seed sandbox for faster iteration).

• Slightly more consistent use of the settings across the team, since the

documented defaults are now visible on every PR rather than tribal knowledge.

Risk

Low. The change is additive text in a Markdown template file — it cannot, by itself, alter the CI workflow's behavior, the production system, or any clinic-facing feature. The one behavior change worth flagging (see Overview) is that every new PR's sandbox now defaults to injecting IS_SANDBOX=true into its app containers, since that value now ships as part of the template's default text rather than requiring an explicit opt-in. As of this diff, no application code reads that variable, so the near-term practical risk of that default is effectively nil — it's currently inert.

What's explicitly out of scope

• No production infrastructure change.
• No change to what clinic staff, patients, or any Dentolize product

surface can do.

• No change to the actual redeploy/gating logic in

.github/workflows/sandbox.yml — that already existed and is unmodified by this PR.

Suggested framing if asked in a standup/exec update

"We made an existing but hidden engineering tool (per-PR preview environments with configurable options) visible by default, so the team actually uses it consistently. No product or customer impact."