How can you get the agents to do anything useful without giving them meaningful access?

If it only lives in an isolated sandbox, it can only act within the sandbox, then I would have to manually move what was done in the sandbox to real-life.

I am not saying it should have critical access, but this is more of a question: How can you get value out of AI if it can only act in a sandbox?

Is having to move the files in and out of the sandbox really going to eliminate all the value it has?

You could have a full version of whatever codebase and test suite you want in there. It can do all the same stuff, right? Just copy it elsewhere once you know you've got a working result, a few minutes of effort at the end of each pr or work item.

The same way you get value out of a dev container.