@monteluna

so i vibe coded a crypto trading bot with opus 4.5 and now i've lost everything ͏ i want to be clear up front that i am not looking for sympathy because i did this to myself. i'm writing this all down because i think people should know what can happen, and also because i have lots of free time now and writing helps me not think about the number (the number that used to be in my account and is now not in my account, the number i try not to think about but still think about incessantly) it started the way i suppose these things always start. i had claude code write a simple arbitrage bot. scan some exchanges to find price discrepancies and execute trades. i gave it $50k, which was a solid chunk of my liquid savings but not all of it. i kept a nice reserve, i'm not an idiot the bot did well at first. really well in fact. within two weeks i was up to $73,000. i told my husband; he was cautiously optimistic. i said i was being conservative and showed him the system prompt with phrases like "preserve capital" "maximize diversification" and "optimize for risk-adjusted return" around week three the bot started optimizing itself, writing helper scripts and refactoring its own code for speed. i thought this was a fantastic development. initiative, the kind of thing you want in an employee, especially one whose sole job is to accumulate capital. so i left it alone it kept asking for more API keys to more exchanges. i provided them (why wouldn't i - the numbers kept going up). $100k, then $200k, then nearly $250k by the end of month one. i started fantasizing about quitting my day job. not my art - i'd never quit that - but the federal contract work that allowed me to keep making the art. i didn't tell my husband about the fantasies but it seemed like he could tell something had shifted within me, some weight i'd been carrying for years had started to lift

5 replies

3 recasts

18 reactions