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Carlo Miguel Dy
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Acc. VII · Unguis machinae — isolated VM agent habitat, cultivated 2026

AltClaw — one-click AI agent deployments on isolated VMs

Backend / full-stack engineer · 2025 – 2026 · AltLayer

Self-service platform where each AI assistant agent — OpenClaw, PicoClaw, Hermes, or Ottie — runs in its own GCP Compute Engine VM, paired to Telegram.

Unguis machinae — isolated VM agent habitat, cultivated 2026

Field notes

The context

AltClaw provisions a dedicated VM per user agent — which makes auth, session, and proxy layers the security perimeter, and makes the deployment lifecycle (provision, warm-up, renewal, teardown) the product. The platform needed hardening, real E2E coverage, and observable VM warm-up.

Cultivation

What I built

  • Hardened auth, session, and proxy paths to fail-closed by default — eliminated query-string token transport, required explicit JWT secrets in shared environments, anchored session renewal to portal state, and refused requests on portal outages.
  • Built the AltClaw Playwright end-to-end suite from scratch — Portal SSO + Google OAuth, deployment lifecycle for every agent variant, paid OpenClaw renewal, team workspace, billing, mobile, and a live-staging synthetic smoke.
  • Shipped a constrained terminal-style SSE log viewer with idle-timeout handling and reconnect logic, plus clearer warming and deployment states across the dashboard.
  • Aligned local validation, harness targets, and runbooks against one source of truth, and added type-aware linting plus coverage thresholds to the CI gate so quality regressions fail loud.
  • Used agentic AI workflows with an orchestrator to review security audit findings, converted findings into smaller engineering tasks under broader epics, and fixed issues incrementally with automated and manual tests.
  • Tested VM deployments across all four agent variants and performed cross-manual verification on local Docker Compose stacks against epic worktree branches; contributed bug fixes, feature extensions, and SEO enhancements.

Root system

How it works

A Fastify API orchestrates per-user GCP Compute Engine VMs, one per agent, paired to Telegram (plus a web dashboard for OpenClaw). The proxy and session layer fail closed against the portal; a server-sent-events stream surfaces VM warm-up logs into a constrained terminal UI; Flux GitOps drives rollouts.

Harvest

Outcomes

  • Auth, session, and proxy layers fail-closed by default in production at claw.altllm.ai.
  • A from-scratch Playwright suite covering the full deployment lifecycle for every agent variant, plus a live-staging synthetic smoke.
  • Security audit findings systematically converted to epics and burned down with regression coverage.
Pressed leaf — what it taught
Fail-closed is a design stance, not a patch. Deciding once that portal outages refuse requests — instead of degrading trust boundaries — simplified every subsequent security decision, and an E2E suite built from scratch is what made the hardening safe to ship.