Investigate local Sentry emulator for Developer Connections

[jeevanpillay]

Context

Developer Connections is being dark-launched behind the Vercel flag developer-connections while we defer the Sentry auth/sandbox integration work.

Earlier investigation found that the current Sentry browser OAuth path expects an external auth-box (DEVELOPER_AUTH_BOX_ORIGIN / DEVELOPER_AUTH_BOX_TOKEN). That service is not ready for production, and the auth step should happen outside the Vercel Sandbox.

Goal

Scope whether a local Sentry emulator is useful for validating the Developer Connections auth flow before integrating with real Sentry infrastructure.

Questions to answer

• What exact behavior does sandbox-side npx sentry need from Sentry auth?
• Do we need a first-party Sentry integration/app before this can work in production?
• Which auth steps must happen externally outside the Vercel Sandbox?
• What minimal emulator surface would let us test the flow locally?
• Can the emulator fit alongside the existing local provider emulators in pnpm dev?

Non-goals

• Do not wire this into production.
• Do not unblock the dark-launch PR.
• Do not build a full Sentry API clone.
• Do not store or expose real Sentry credentials in sandbox runtime.

Acceptance criteria

• A short design note or spec describing the emulator boundary.
• A recommended minimal API surface for the emulator.
• A decision on whether to build the emulator before real Sentry integration.
• Follow-up implementation issue(s), if the spike says the emulator is worthwhile.

Related work

• Developer Connections dark-launch flag: developer-connections
• Existing design note: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-06-04-sentry-emulator-design.md

[coderabbitai]

🔗 Related PRs

#641 - fix(desktop): observability hardening — IPC routing + debug-id symbolication [merged]

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