Skip to main content
Clark accesses runtime data during development to build and debug apps — the same way a human developer would. Clark only operates in Edit mode; it never runs against Preview or Production environments.

​
Why Clark needs data access

Like any developer, Clark needs to see runtime data to build correctly. During development, Clark can do things such as:
  • Execute APIs and read responses
  • Run one-off queries to sample data
  • Inspect individual API step output
  • Read browser console logs
  • Screenshot the app
  • Run automated tests
This is consistent with how AI coding tools work broadly — agents like browser-based copilots, MCP-connected assistants, and cloud-hosted AI editors all access runtime data during development. Unlike generic AI coding agents, Superblocks gives Administrators explicit control over which data environments Clark can access during development.

​
Developing against lower environments

As a standard SDLC best practice, we recommend developing against lower environments rather than production. Use data tags to configure a development data environment for Edit mode. Admins can enforce this by only allowing non-production data tags in the Edit environment — see Manage environments & data tags. This lets Clark freely test write operations, run queries, and debug without any risk of corrupting production data.

​
Hybrid deployments

For Hybrid customers, the data plane runs inside your VPC, but Clark and AI inference run in Superblocks Cloud. This means data accessed in Edit mode is temporarily sent to the Superblocks Cloud so Clark can use it during development. To keep production data in your network, we recommend hybrid customers limit Edit mode to a non-production data tag so that sensitive data is never sent to Superblocks Cloud.