SimNow
A compatible sandbox, so learners stop waiting on real instances
A training sandbox that implements the exact HTTP surface Morgan's AI tutor uses to drive a ServiceNow instance, so the tutor runs against it unmodified, just by pointing at a different host.
- Role
- Sole developer: clean-room API implementation, fidelity testing
- Test suite
- 34 / 34 passing
- Provision time
- Milliseconds
- Tutor changes needed
- Zero
The problem
Morgan depends on the learner having a working developer instance. Those instances are waitlisted, hibernate after ten days of inactivity, and require learners to manually activate plugins before a lesson will work. A tutoring product whose first step is 'wait for someone else to give you an environment' has a hole in it.
The approach
01
Match the surface, not the product
SimNow implements the specific, documented REST surface the tutor actually calls, derived clean-room from the tutor's own client code. The tutor needs no changes at all; a single configuration value points it at SimNow instead of a real instance.
02
Fix what real instances get wrong for learners
Instances provision in milliseconds, never hibernate, reset cleanly per lesson, and have every plugin already active. The constraints that make real instances painful for teaching are simply absent.
03
Verify fidelity rather than assume it
A compatibility layer that is subtly wrong is worse than none: it teaches learners incorrect behaviour. The implementation was checked against documented platform behaviour across all three tiers of the surface.
How it turned out
- Full test suite passing across all three tiers of the implemented surface.
- Surfaced a real bug in the tutor's own client code: a mislabelled field that only became visible once there was a strict reference implementation to test against.
- Removes the hard external dependency that gated the tutor's onboarding.
SimNow is an independent training simulator. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or a product of ServiceNow, Inc. It reimplements a small documented REST surface for educational use and deliberately avoids any trademarked branding or interface design.
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