Problems using Adobe AIR's adt over ssh

I was trying to create a build machine for Spacejacked over the last few days. The setup is a Mac Mini running Virtualbox and virtual machines for OS X Yosemite, Windows 7, and Arch Linux. We have a script on the Mac Mini that ssh's into each VM and triggers the build there.

We use Adobe AIR to deploy the game on Windows and OS X. We do this by packaging the game with AIR's captive runtime so that users don't need to install AIR on their systems. One requirement of this process is that captive runtime bundles must be created on their target OS via adt. (Hence the virtual machines.)

I noticed that our automated build process would get stuck when running adt via ssh on the OS X VM. It turns out that the Java processes that adt spawns were getting stuck, as mentioned in a question on StackOverflow. The solution to the problem was simple, just as in the accepted answer on StackOverflow: I simply configured the OS X VM to automatically log in with Terminal open, et voilà, everything was resolved.