With one of the recent updates (openclaw) came permission changes. In my case it also prevents it from changing its config. If that is the case you need to edit it yourself or run the configure command to run the 'wizzard'.
SSH. That was the easy part for me as I was on nvim already, I just installed my dev stack on the remote machine. Tbh. I rarely need the tools now. Most important is lazygit for diffs now. Tmux is also very useful.
Why not host that machine yourself. Like on a Proxmox or so. Gives you multiple envs if needed. Another thing I noticed is that dev resource consumption (CPU and mem) goes up significantly (Rust in my case) when multiple agents work, test and use tools (LSP) simultaneously. So 16 core 64gb does not seem that much any more.
I would rather have real MCP API servers, but it will take some time before we are going to develop "MCP first". So this might be a good transitional tool.