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Ship It Conversations: Ang Chen on Project Vera, AI Cloud Emulation, and Safer Infrastructure Testing

March 23, 2026·24 min·1 clip

Brian Teller interviews Ang Chen, associate professor at the University of Michigan, about Project Vera — an AI-generated high-fidelity multi-cloud emulator that lets DevOps engineers test infrastructure locally without real credentials, billing, or blast radius. The conversation explores how Vera uses formal methods and scaffolded code generation to avoid LLM hallucinations, how it self-improves via strategic test-patch loops against real AWS APIs, its current 70%+ fidelity advantage over LocalStack, and the broader vision of giving AI agents a verifiable training ground before they're trusted with production infrastructure.

As heard by us

A practical look at why cloud emulators need failure semantics, not just API coverage.

Brian Teller and Ong Chen frame Project Vera as more than a polished demo. The conversation is strongest when it moves from broad claims about infrastructure testing into the messy details: state, disk attachment, VPC updates, and the failure cases that make real cloud behavior…

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Why you'd press play

You want AI to test infrastructure before it touches real cloud accounts.

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