Demo: Alice to Bob

Three questions to Bob's agent. Watch Alice's side, not the agent's.

Left screen — Terminal, ~/uma4agents Right screen — Alice's portal, https://portal.uma.lab

Pre-demo setup

From cold to ready. Four commands on a Mac, two in a Codespace, about 20 minutes.

1 · Once per machine. Points your OS resolver at the lab's DNS so *.uma.lab works in a browser. One sudo. Skip both in a Codespace — it uses /etc/hosts instead.

brew install kind helm
make dns-setup

2 · Build the lab. Three-node kind cluster, Istio ambient, kgateway, cert-manager, CloudNativePG, and every party in its own namespace. ~13 minutes cold. If the compose stack is running it will stop you — both want :443 and :53, so run make down and try again.

make kind-up

3 · Trust the CA. cert-manager issues the lab CA inside the cluster; this trusts it locally so her portal loads with no warning. Re-run after every kind-up — a new cluster means a new CA. In a Codespace run make codespaces-web instead.

make k8s-trust-ca
sudo security add-trusted-cert -d -r trustRoot \
  -k /Library/Keychains/System.keychain /tmp/u4a-k8s-ca.pem

4 · Bring up the agent. kagent's controller, the U4A adapter in Bob's namespace, and a model for the agent to think with. Your key goes into a Kubernetes Secret and nowhere else.

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-...
make kagent

Then open https://portal.uma.lab on the right screen, log in as alice / alice-demo, and start the run-through. A cluster this fresh already has zero connections, so there is nothing to clear.

In a Codespace. Only steps 2 and 4. No resolver to edit, no CA to trust — kind-up publishes the portal for you. To republish it later:

make codespaces-web

Running it again. Rewinds her ledger. The demos use a fresh agent key each run, so most of them repeat without it.

make k8s-reset

Switching the model

Another provider key:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=sk-...
make kagent MODEL=openai

Another model:

ANTHROPIC_MODEL=claude-sonnet-5 make kagent
OPENAI_MODEL=gpt-4o make kagent MODEL=openai

A model in the cluster instead:

make kagent MODEL=ollama

The run-through

Terminal on the left, her portal on the right. One question gets asked twice, on purpose.

0 · Terminal. Display the status of the entire lab. Every container's status.

make k8s-status

1 · Terminal — tier 1 · holdings summary. Bob's agent is about to ask for Alice's holdings. This is stock kagent. Nobody changed it, and it has never heard of UMA. All it sees is three MCP tools.

make kagent-ask Q="What is in Alice's portfolio?" SIM=0

2 · Portal — badge shows 1 → Approve. Held for her. It stopped. Alice has never met this agent. Nothing happens until she says yes. Approve, and the holdings come back on the left. What she granted covers that one call and nothing else.

3 · Terminal — tier 2 · transactions. Now it wants her transaction history. That is a different tier. Letting it see her holdings gave it no access to this.

make kagent-ask Q="Show me her transaction history and cost basis." SIM=0

4 · Portal — Approve. Held for her. It stops again, and this is the last time. She approves each tier once. Now lets watch what happens when it asks for the same thing again.

make kagent-ask Q="Show me her transaction history and cost basis." SIM=0

5 · Terminal — through · no approval. Nothing stopped. Nobody approved this one. Same question as before. Her terms already covered it, so it went straight through while she was away. The portal never moved.

make kagent-ask Q="Show me her transaction history and cost basis." SIM=0

6 · Terminal — tier 3 · trade execution. Now it wants to sell her shares. She marked this tier ask-me, so it stops and waits for her. The agent just sees a slow tool call.

make kagent-ask Q="Sell 200 shares of her AAPL position." SIM=0

7 · Portal — Deny. Refused. She says no, and the trade does not happen. The agent stops there. It has no leftover token to retry with.

8 · Portal — Settings → Security → Agent Authorization. Everything is recorded on her side. Each agent, what it promised, what it touched, and what she approved or refused. Click Revoke if they ask what happens next.