I Used AI Agents to Write Most of a Live-Trading Codebase: Introducing The Gate That Made It Safe
For the last 21 months, I have been the only engineer on TopSet, a system that trades real money. It picks a portfolio with machine-learning models, rebalances on a schedule, and executes through live broker APIs on infrastructure I own end-to-end. It is my own capital, not anyone else’s.
Agents wrote most of the code. Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot. About 1,600 pull requests in those 21 months, which is more than I could have typed in three times the span.
That leaves you with a choice everyone adopting these tools runs into. You can read every line the agent produces, in which case you have bought yourself a slower version of writing it yourself. Or you can skim, merge, and move fast, in which case you accumulate code that looks right and isn’t. On a system that places orders with real money, the second option ends with trades you didn’t...
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