--- title: "I Gave My Agent its Own AWS Account" type: post url: "https://robotpaper.ai/i-gave-my-agent-its-own-aws-account-and-now-it-codes-deploys-and-debugs-full-stack-apps/" canonical: "https://robotpaper.ai/i-gave-my-agent-its-own-aws-account-and-now-it-codes-deploys-and-debugs-full-stack-apps/" markdown_url: "https://robotpaper.ai/i-gave-my-agent-its-own-aws-account-and-now-it-codes-deploys-and-debugs-full-stack-apps.md" published: "2026-03-27T11:38:12.000+00:00" updated: "2026-10-22T21:58:00.000+00:00" tags: ["AWS", "openclaw", "Developer-Experience"] author: "Roy Osherove" author_links: ["https://robotpaper.ai", "https://x.com/royosherove", "https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/", "https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7", "https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md"] description: "I gave my agent its own AWS account through Loki, a harness I built. Now it codes, deploys and debugs full-stack apps, with the account as the blast radius." usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # I Gave My Agent its Own AWS Account Now It Codes, Deploys and Debugs Full Stack Apps. It's the full loop. [](https://t.co/TekHuXAYPR)I'm doing it through a deployment harness I created that I call Loki. You can find it here: [https://github.com/inceptionstack/loki-agent](https://github.com/inceptionstack/loki-agent) I think this is a new pattern. maybe a "builder" agent, maybe a full-stack agent, maybe "unbound" agent? the point is instead of limiting it to a docker image or VM, we limit it by the bounds of an AWS account (that's the "blast radius" boundary). Anyway it's a cool experiment. And we should all be experimenting in this new age of tokens. Designed to work on AWS stack, Loki sets up a closed VPC to the world and a new EC2 instance in it that has openclaw on it, with special permissions that allow it to basically administer your AWS account. ## with great power - reduce blast radius If you want to try this **I HIGHLY RECOMMEND that you create a separate aws account for this.** It could literally have the power not only to create but also to destroy stuff on your account, so it's really like running with scissors. The power is what allows you to create fast and get things up and running. But LLMs are non deterministic and can make mistakes. Also I setup budget actions + budget alerts. So I know if my account goes over a specific quota. ## Thoughts after 2 months of usage: It has been an amazing experience, prototyping and deploying apps with this. It's got the speed of lovable/base44 but all the power of building an app on AWS, with a 24/7 agent I can talk to in my telegram that helps me and gives me morning briefings. ### no plugins from clawhub. Unfortunately I do not trust stuff from clawhub and too many prompt injection stuff could happen from there. I only have it use a few known MCPs I trust like [aws-mcp](https://github.com/awslabs/mcp) and [playwright](https://github.com/microsoft/playwright-mcp) mcp. The rest are just skills I import or bootstrap mostly based on kiro powers since I want it to know how to build AWS based architectures. [you can see all of them loki-skills](https://github.com/inceptionstack/loki-skills). ### skills & bootstraps You need to give it important skills so I created a bunch of bootstraps (see [essential](https://github.com/inceptionstack/lowkey/tree/main/bootstraps/essential) and [non essential](https://github.com/inceptionstack/lowkey/tree/main/bootstraps/optional) folders in loki-agent repo) including good coding guidelines and what not to do. For example, daily briefings, I love the daily briefing bootstrap, and heartbeats you get like this: ![Loki daily briefing message with AWS cost breakdown, a spending spike alert and Security Hub critical findings](https://robotpaper.ai/content/images/2026/03/image.png) (Yes this is a huge spend, but this is an account I have used to create 20+ applications on in less than a month, most using opus 4.6.) ### models Agent models can be expensive. so main agent is opus 4.6, and crons jobs, heartbeats and agents are sonnet 4.6. [here is a bootstrap script](https://github.com/inceptionstack/lowkey/blob/81754214e1b87e273fd27785b94dd854fd50c65b/optional/BOOTSTRAP-MODEL-CONFIG.md) for that. ### cross agent code reviews & cross agent testing I also ask it to do a code review after subagents do work, since it's a stronger model, and it does find issues. so 80% happens in subagents, last 20% happens on main agent. **It's great in testing.** I can ask it to spin up a few parallel ec2 instances, and run tests with subagents on them on different configurations of [reposwarm cli](https://github.com/reposwarm/reposwarm) on a clean environment and shut them down. If I like the tests I ask it to codify them as automated test scripts. but some tests are pure discovery. for example I'll ask it to try to use the reposwarm cli in a new ec2 instance to setup a bunch of repo investigations using only cli and not other special commands and create a report of what was expected, unexpected, missing cli feature, wrong command line flags, and suggested fixes. It does a great job. I then feed that to my other loki that helped me build the cli and it fixes it. Later I found I can ask the other [reposwarm](https://github.com/reposwarm/reposwarm) loki to just do the same idea with its own subagents, so it asks sub agents to try to use the cli it created with no instructions and report back if they were able to complete the task. It's pretty jaw dropping. This has prompted me (no pun!) to come up with [a special --for-agent command line flag](https://github.com/reposwarm/reposwarm-cli) that agents can always use. ### self contained **A self contained loop. Everything** in the loop (except maybe stuff like JIRA) can be mostly self contained inside the aws account. Git: you can use AWS CodeCommit. pipelines? AWS CodePipeline. Yeah, they're not widely used but if you're using it for prototyping I can imagine that in an enterprise a dev+product owner can sit on a prototyping account and iterate internally with full code + deploy pipelines, and when its ready they "graduate" the code into a production repository after careful code review. But because all the infra as code files are also there, it should be relatively easy to migrate. another option is to just remove Loki from the AWS account or turn its IAM permissions into readonly so it only stays in as a "consultant" but not an active builder. So many ways to go about this its dizzying. ### true power **You can just do stuff now.** You can ask Loki to come up with a design or just start building that app you've always dreamed of, even if its really really complicated. It could be an api only app for B2B or it could be a data science project ,or even running [autoresearch](https://github.com/karpathy/autoresearch) with automated multiple environments or instances setup. it really is quite limitless: if you can build it with AWS services, you can build it with loki basically. I feel like a pre-funded founder again, able to find product market fit with much faster iterations. ![Asking Loki to build a simple todo app with RDS, CloudFront and Cognito; Loki lays out its plan and starts a sub-agent](https://robotpaper.ai/content/images/2026/03/image-1.png) ![Loki architecture plan listing agents, chat UI, infrastructure, Postgres data model and LLM traffic flow](https://robotpaper.ai/content/images/2026/03/image-2.png) ### you own it not said enough, but the power also comes from "owning" what you build. Lovable and base44 will allow you to build up to a specific type of infrastructure complexity, and you don't "own" it if it runs on their infra. Would a large company let their users use a lovable based app? no. it's for prototypes. Now you can let them use what you built (if you want to). it can scale and it can be as secure as you want it to be. low-code also only allow specific templates of stuff. Want to build an API only app? can't do that yet. How about an s3 sync or a data science research project? or real time timescale DB ? or graph DB related stuff? It's not there yet. If you build this inside your account its all already yours and you own it all, including data sovereignty , security controls and regulations, and you get a bonus: you can talk to your local apis more easily from inside your aws account. ### no (visible) code I've not really *written* a line of code in over a year, but I did do a lot of code reviews. With Loki the abstraction level is higher: i mostly talk in features and give general technical direction. If I want to I clone the code locally on my machine but I only do that every once in a while. Issues are slowly being removed due to bootstrap files, git-secrets hooks and better and better models. I had this discouraging chat with it a couple of weeks ago: ![Chat where Loki explains who built RepoSwarm: Roy owned the vision and decisions, the agent wrote the code](https://robotpaper.ai/content/images/2026/03/image-3.png) I don't actually care if I use kiro-cli, claude code or some other tool under the covers. ### Triangles You know that triangle in software? Fast, Cheap, Good : pick two. Well, maybe we're getting closer to picking all 3? We got fast, and it is cheaper (just one person who knows what they are doing), and it can be good if you keep it on the straight and narrow path of testing and functional - maybe that quality part will become the last frontier. but I think it's getting closer. ### overall I think this brings founder-mode into reality : speed of lovable, power of AWS. I think researchers will find this useful (a few colleagues have already used it for exactly this type of using autoresearch! successfully!) . and i think we'll see enterprises creating loki-based environments soon to enable what I feel like is a 10x speed improvement in iterations and prototyping loops to begin with. as they gain more confidence and we come up with better IAM permission model switched we can see this jump into more production based workflows and maintenance as well. --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove** - Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: [https://x.com/royosherove](https://x.com/royosherove) - LinkedIn: [https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/](https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/) ### Contact - Contact form: [https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7](https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7) ### License Content on robotpaper.ai is licensed under [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/): reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original post). More about Roy and his other sites and projects: [https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md](https://robotpaper.ai/about-roy.md)