Every trade my bot makes has to get past a second AI first (the BOT setup)

This is the wiring behind the reel, and where to get the app. The app is TradingXBot. I built it, I run it on a $12 server, and it trades my own money. Nothing on this page is advice; it's a build log for a thing that asks permission before it does anything.

How it's wired

Twenty four small strategies watch a dozen coins. Each is a small rule (a moving average cross, a channel break, that kind of thing), and on every cycle each of them gets to say what it would do: buy, sell, or hold. That's all a strategy can do here. Propose.

A separate model reads every proposal and answers in writing. Yes or no, with the reason, one line per coin per cycle, and every line lands in the Activity log so I can read later why a trade did or didn't happen. "hold", "skipped", a buy the reviewer approved, a buy the reviewer approved and a risk cap then refused.

Then the boring part, which is the part that matters:

• A cap refuses an order. It never shrinks it to fit. If a proposal is too big for the book, the answer is no, not "a bit less".
• Every entry carries a stop-loss placed on the exchange in the same breath as the order, so the exit exists even if my server dies.
• The strategy that opens a coin owns it until it's flat. Two strategies used to trade against each other on one coin and pay the fees twice (I found that one in the paper ledger, at 11 minutes in, which is the cheapest place to find anything).
• There's a halt switch. One button, the engine freezes, nothing new opens until I clear it, and the exchange stops stay in place (there's a setting to close everything on halt too).

And the rule I'd keep if I threw the rest away: a rule has to survive a backtest before it can run live. The check lives in the trading loop itself, so a formula nobody tested returns hold on every live cycle and editing the file by hand doesn't get around it. The backtester runs a rule over years of history and stamps the result ROBUST or FRAGILE. The one in the reel ran over five years, lost, got stamped FRAGILE, and never ran.

One more thing the reel didn't have room for: executing is its own switch. Until you flip Auto-execute, each approved proposal waits in the dashboard and you press Execute or Dismiss yourself. Mine is on, and the rest of this page is why I was willing to flip it.

The night it froze

If the reviewer is unreachable, nothing trades. Not carefully. Not at all.

I found out how literal that is at 3am on Sunday 20 September. The reviewer's account hit its usage limit just after three. Its last review went through at 03:12; the next one came at 12:48. In between, the bot could neither enter nor exit by rule and only the exchange stops were live. Nine and a half hours of a green dashboard doing nothing, which is exactly what I'd asked it to do and still not a fun thing to wake up to.

So the next version (v1.1.104, shipped by lunchtime) can run the review through a second provider. Monday morning the second provider hit its own weekly cap, and switching back was a config change, no restart. Two outages in two days is a lot, and the alternative, a bot that trades on a hunch when its reviewer is gone, is worse. I'll take the freeze.

Get the app

Paper mode is free forever: the full engine on real market data with simulated money, no account anywhere, no card. That's where I'd start, and where I'd stay for a week.

Linux or macOS, one line in a terminal:

curl -fsSL https://artifacts.gobiautomates.com/install.sh | sh

Windows, in PowerShell:

iwr -useb https://artifacts.gobiautomates.com/install.ps1 | iex

Or download the installer directly: Linux AppImage, Windows .exe. Windows will warn you because the installer isn't code-signed yet; the download section on the site says what to click.

Going live is a one-time licence, no subscription, and it needs a Hyperliquid account (paper mode needs none). The price and the steps are on the site, and the docs cover the agents, backtesting, the halt switch and going live. To run it round the clock the way I do, there's a server install for a rented Linux box at about $6 to $12 a month.

Where it will disappoint you

It trades one exchange. Hyperliquid perpetuals, nothing else. No stocks, no spot on another exchange. If that's not your thing, paper mode is still a decent way to watch how a propose and review loop behaves, and that's all it will be.

A dead reviewer is a full stop. That's the design, and it means an expired API quota can park the bot for a morning. I should have had a second provider configured before the first outage. Now I do.

Paper mode has no backtest gate. A rule nobody tested runs happily on paper. The gate only bites when you flip to live, which is the point, but it does mean paper results and live behaviour can differ for a reason that has nothing to do with the market.

The reviewer writes a reason. A written reason is not a right reason. The model can be confidently wrong, and the log will show you a tidy sentence explaining a bad call. The caps and the stops exist because I don't trust the sentence.

The Windows installer isn't signed yet, and macOS is the one-line install only, no .dmg.

What would you make it ask before every trade?

Ask me in The Rabbit Hole and I'll tell you what mine asks, and which of those questions were added after something went wrong.

It is the room where I keep the parts that don't fit on a page like this: the wiring notes, what broke the first time, and the rules that looked good in a backtest and then didn't. No trade calls in there, that isn't what the room is for.

Two catches, up front, because that's the rule here. It's private, so you have to be inside to read anything. And it's new, so you'd be early rather than joining something busy.

Free: skool.com/the-rabbit-hole-3206