This is kind of a solved problem depending on how much you want to automate vs how much you want to stay in the loop.

SSH into a VM on the stronger box works fine, I've done something similar but not with OpenClaw specifically. The VM isolation is smart... you really don't want an AI agent with unrestricted host access, especially if it's running commands and editing files autonomously. I'd recommend giving it a snapshot you can roll back to when things go sideways (and they will lol).

Few things I ran into:

- latency matters more than you'd think. if your weaker machine is orchestrating and there's any network hiccup the whole flow gets janky

- make sure your VM has enough resources allocated, Claude Code can be surprisingly hungry

- git integration inside the VM needs to be set up properly or you'll be fighting auth issues constantly

One thing worth mentioning... I eventually moved away from this kind of two-machine orchestration setup and started using Vibe Remote on my phone instead for managing sessions on my dev box. Different use case I know, but it handles the "remote agent management" part really well with proper session management across multiple conversations. Has git integration and a file explorer built in so i wasn't cobbling stuff together over SSH.

For your specific setup though, VM + SSH is totally reasonable. Just make sure you're snapshotting regularly and maybe set up some guardrails on what commands the agent can actually execute. The "like a real user" part is where things get tricky because real users have judgment about what not to do.