Mai Casuela

Latest — 03 Jul 2026

Can open-source AI agents escape their sandbox containers? (initial results)

Last June, I presented my capstone project at the Technical Alignment Research Accelerator (TARA) Demo Day. The whole thing started with a paper from the UK AI Security Institute called Quantifying Frontier LLM Capabilities for Container Sandbox Escape. From this paper, they introduced SandboxEscapeBench, a benchmark to test whether AI

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Startups and the hard parts

It's been two months or so since I departed from Matcha, a service booking platform and the startup I built with 2 other people. I've been reflecting on my exit for a while now. Tracing back what led to my decision and how it feels like

Why I kinda like working for government

I preface this with the fact that I've been in government, in particular the Judiciary, only for less than 2 months. I've been putting off writing this because I feel like there's so much to say but I often find myself at the end

Looking back at 2025

It's been 2 weeks into 2026 and I feel like it's been a great start of the year from startup product wins (getting the app to be stable) to simple personal wins like getting my driver's license renewed. If I was being honest, 2025

Create your own analytics dashboard with Pocketbase and Metabase

Lately at Kaya (tentatively), we've been onboarding a bunch of service providers into the platform. We also have been getting bookings within the app and it's about time we're able to track our KPIs (especially successful bookings). Pocketbase's UI has been clear

Building Loomify: Loomify is (kinda) dead

Before we were Loomify, we were Patch, a team of four with varying backgrounds who entered the ASEAN-China-India Youth Leadership Summit 2023 with a gamified circular fashion app. That idea took us to Singapore, then after that competition we went through several pivots (game → marketplace → social seller tool) before we

How to sync your Zotero files with Nextcloud

Recently, I've been wanting to read more AI safety related papers because I kinda want to get the habit of it. I attend this paper reading club where we read a new paper related to AI safety every week. To come prepared, I usually just download the PDFs

Building Loomify: Deployments and API Integrations

I have spent my waking hours trying to figure out how to solve my issues in deployment. I've mentioned before that I've been using Cloudflare Workers to host our app. There are features that I like that make me choose this over Vercel and Netlify such

Building Loomify: Routes and Developer Consoles

Today, I was on a mission to fixing how our website redirects its URL paths and domains. We have a lot links plans that focuses on just blogging, job postings, booking a call and so on. On the first assessment of the problem was that we have all this intended

Building a SMS fraud checker

Last April 2025, I had the opportunity to present an AI-powered SMS fraud checker at the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas for the Youth Financial Inclusion hackathon. To be honest, this project actually underwent a lot of changes and was originally supposed to be a submission for Apart Research's

About

Mai Casuela

Hi, I'm Mai - a software engineer who builds things and writes about the process. I document my projects, share technical setups, and occasionally write case studies.