Project Mantis

I just signed up for the Alpaca AI Trading Agents Hackathon.

Now I need to figure out what on earth I'm going to build.

After a few ideas, I landed on something I've decided to call Project Mantis.

The basic idea?

An AI trading system that doesn't just follow instructions. It gets to work on its own.

That's about as much as I'm going to reveal for now.

I have a pretty ambitious idea for how I want Mantis to work, and I'm curious to see whether I can actually pull it off within the hackathon.

There are a lot of unanswered questions.

Can an AI make good trading decisions autonomously?

Can it learn from experience?

Can it recognize when something isn't working?

And, perhaps most importantly, can I build all of this without accidentally creating a very expensive digital idiot?

We'll find out.

I'll be documenting the build here as I go — the decisions, experiments, failures, and hopefully a few things that actually work.

Day 0.

Let's build Mantis.