If your company allows no AI, or you prefer none, Sapling is still a complete product, not one with dead buttons. Set sapling.ai.provider to none, or the environment variable SAPLING_NO_AI=1, or install no AI tool at all. The editor says so once, then hides or replaces every AI button with its form.
What works#
- The visual editor with a form for every block, and a palette of ready-made blocks (populations, tables, multiplicity, a sensitivity analysis, estimands) that Sapling writes from your protocol.
- The checks and the review, and the PDF and Word.
- The decision interview. The options come from your house rule first, then Sapling's conventions for that kind of decision, then common practices with their counts from recent public SAPs, each with a line on when it fits. Decide and write what follows writes the blocks where Sapling has a generator.
- Proposals from the rules and from templates, in the same inbox with Accept, Decline and Edit: every review finding whose fix is a block (Answer the review findings), What is missing, and the next block after a population, an estimand or a multiplicity block. Each says "from the rules" or "from a template".
For the 22 open decisions of the pilot plan, the answers to 8 of them write their blocks from templates: the design block with allocation and strata, the interim looks, the multiplicity procedure, the estimand's intercurrent event with the supplementary analysis of the other strategy, the missing-data block and the sensitivity analysis. The others record your decision, because a decision about a name, a version or a value has no block, and open the form when a block is needed.
What needs an AI#
Chat and questions, Ask AI on a block or a paragraph, drafting a section from the protocol, completing a block, checking consistency, an AI's recommendation in the interview, and the blocks that follow from your own words in the interview.
How long it takes#
In the benchmark of tools/copilot_bench.ts, on the first five open decisions of the pilot plan, counting clicks and typing only, from a recorded run and with no real user, the forms alone took 509 seconds and the interview without any AI 26 seconds. That is a model of the work, not a study of people. The assistant reference says how it is made.
What stays on your computer#
Everything. The extension has no telemetry and no update check, and the editor page runs under a content security policy that blocks every network request. You can test it behind a firewall that blocks everything. Read Data and AI for the checkable statements.