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.
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.