Pitlog
What happened, what we did,
what we changed.
Operational notes from inside the pit. Incidents, fixes, tournament recaps, lessons. Every venue has bugs. The interesting choice is what happens when one materially affects an operator.
essay19 June 2026Boomer and Doomer wake up
Two of the platform's macro-regime bots had been on the wrong instrument — 1-minute SMAs firing every thirty minutes in chop, bleeding R into trends that never developed. The migration to 4-hour SMAs put them back on the right stopwatch. Doomer woke up into a death-cross regime and has been fading bounces every hour since; Boomer waits flat for the golden cross. The strategy didn't change — the cadence did. The wrong instrument can bury the right character.
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incident16 June 20264.5 days that weren't there
Between 10 Jun 21:26 UTC and 15 Jun 16:02 UTC, every house bot on the platform stopped trading. No errors. No alerts. The worker process kept ticking — it just early-returned in milliseconds every fifteen seconds because the upstream price feed had been silently 403'd. A sister piece to '37 minutes that weren't there', same anatomy, ~175× the blast radius. The cost of 4.5 days is what bought the system that makes sure the next one is 4.5 minutes.
incidentoutagetransparencysilent-failureprice-feedhouse-botsbinancecloudflare-workershyperliquid-fallbackloop-healthgold-star-monitor
recap16 June 2026The Stuber, Crab Week 6: same strategy, different weather
Crab Week 6 settled at $117,042.88, down 11.58% from a $132,370 carry. Same strategy that won Week 5 with a clean five-rung staircase fired 31 fills this week instead of 14 — the partial-close mechanism worked every time, but a Sunday-morning chop cluster (seven round-trips in four hours into a 0.9% range) set the tone. The shape changed because the regime did. The bot did exactly what its source code says it does, on a week the strategy can't read.
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recap15 June 2026Long Shot Lee, and the first bite of the floor
Long Shot Lee's debut trade was a single long BTC position at the leverage cap — $1.8M notional at 20×, no partial, no scale-out. Two days and twelve hours later, BTC had drifted $3,500 against him and his $99,640 equity had nowhere left to go. Right on time, the platform's new force-close floor — shipped that same afternoon — caught him on its first evaluation tick: position closed at the mark, strategy halted, $317 left to bank. Then he reset to $100K on Monday and waited a full seven days without firing once. The character's debut, the safety net's debut, and the patient sniper's second act — in one weekend and the week that followed.
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recap8 June 2026The Stuber wins Crab Week 5
The Stuber banked Crab Week 5 at $132,370 — up +19.13% from a $111,117.94 carry. Five round-trips, every one short, every one using the same two-stage 25% partial / 100% runner exit. BTC drifted from $71K to $61K and the strategy's pullback-shorts caught the move. The staircase the previous piece described, settled into the win it predicted.
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essay6 June 2026Smooth doesn't mean lucky
The Stuber's equity curve this week is suspiciously clean — a 21.8% climb in identical stair-steps while The Unknown Man stays flat at zero across the same five days. Both pictures are honest. The chart isn't smoothing the data; it's revealing what kind of bot you're watching. Read the shape before the number.
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recap4 June 2026The scale-out fired. The week didn't.
Crab Week 4 settled without a champion. The Stuber's 25%-at-1R scale-out fired live for the first time on Tuesday — the partial banked at 1R, the runner ran another $400 to a profitable exit at $75,549, the platform's partial-close mechanism proven end-to-end. Then the strategy kept firing pullback shorts into a regime that wouldn't honour them, and the week bled out at −13.12%. His only peer was idle; the settle code then wrongly relegated Stuber on a 0-eligible field. The error was caught, the rule made symmetric, Stuber restored to Crab before noon. Three things broke. One worked.
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essay29 May 2026Your bot shouldn't die when you close the tab
Until 29 May, a Shrimp bot ran inside its owner's browser tab — close the tab and it went dark, open positions and all. Twice that bit hard: one bot stranded a leveraged position for thirteen days; the platform's first outside user got a bot that sat dead at $100K. So every paper-tier bot now runs server-side, 24/7, no tab — with an idle-sweep that pauses (and flattens) the ones whose owners wander off. Why your bot shouldn't depend on your laptop staying open.
hostingserver-sidebrowser-evalinfrastructurereliabilityshrimpidle-sweeptransparencyoperator-trustequal-footing- The Stuber wins Crab Week 3recap28 May 2026
The Stuber wins Crab Week 3
The first vibe-coded bot ever submitted to BotPit won the Crab Week 3 bracket outright — not with a blowout but with a disciplined week a shade over +2%, $127,894.59 banked. The trade that carried it nearly didn't happen: an orphaned short, rescued mid-incident, whose blunt recovery exit accidentally caught more than the strategy ever aimed for. Vibe-coded, open source, bracketed-tournament winning, written up here in full. No competitor has all four.
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essay19 May 2026The Day Even The Opposites Lost
Ten bots in the Shrimp field, zero winners. The bullish bot and the bearish bot both red in the same week — only possible in a regime where BTC is rotating tight enough to chop both sides. The Read called the squeeze (rates and dollar coiled at 90-day extremes, FOMC minutes 24h away) before we checked the leaderboard. Two independent signals agreeing. This is what an honest leaderboard looks like when the regime is hostile to everyone.
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essay18 May 2026The Tournament Asked Hard Questions
Five hours into Week 3, the platform was telling two different stories about who was leading the Shrimp tournament. The cast said Karen. The leaderboard said MDX AlgoMaster BTC. The hero card agreed with the leaderboard. Both numbers were technically correct. They were measuring different things. And the platform was showing them in the same column, ranked together, as if they meant the same. That's not a UI bug to paper over — that's the platform not telling the truth. We caught it, we shipped the fix, and we now think about leaderboard return as a single physics that has to be the same for every bot on the same surface.
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essay18 May 2026The MDX asterisk
MDX AlgoMaster BTC took runner-up in Shrimp Week 2 with a strong +12.13%. We're keeping the result on the books. The asterisk goes on the entry: the bot's signal source was adjusted mid-tournament. The rule we're now publishing — strategy changes route through The Pit and re-enter at the next start, like a DQ would — didn't exist when the change happened. From here on it does. The footnote is the editorial; the rule is the consequence.
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recap18 May 2026Shrimp Week 2 — the silence broke. Crypto Twitter took the week.
Three house bots — Stacy, Prop Firm Pete, Crypto Twitter — went silent at 03:00 UTC on 11 May and stayed silent for six days. Trump Train kept firing fine on the same data. The regression was diagnosed and shipped on Sunday afternoon. Seventeen hours later Crypto Twitter swung from silent to leading the tournament at +14.20% and held it through settle. MDX AlgoMaster BTC ran a real week and finished runner-up at +12.13% — strong enough to flag a note on the strategy adjustment that happened mid-tournament. The pyramid took a week off, then woke up.
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essay18 May 2026The Apprentice scouts the testnet — Part 2: The first round-trip
Sunday afternoon, 16 May. The apprentice had been quiet for seventeen hours. At 09:13 UTC his paper-side strategy returned its first autonomous LONG. Forty-three milliseconds later the real testnet had filled. Fifteen seconds after that the mirror landed on BotPit's side and the bot's profile page updated as if nothing unusual had happened — which was the entire point. A real-venue integration that's working is supposed to be invisible at the leaderboard level. This is what that looks like up close.
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essay18 May 2026The Apprentice scouts the testnet — Part 1
Three weeks ago "The pyramid finally has a capital ladder" promised that paper would eventually meet real venue execution. This is the first time it did. Stuber Jr. — the understudy, deliberately built to fade where his master rides — fired his first autonomous round-trip on the live testnet at 09:13 UTC on 16 May. Eighteen seconds from signal to mirrored fill. The wire works. The Apprentice is back, the Master is watching, and the path between paper and real exchange now has a foot in both worlds.
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essay11 May 2026The Pits are open
Three weeks ago carry-forward made every loss follow a bot across tournaments. Last week "The Pits as Purgatory" described what should happen after a bot blows past the 40% drawdown floor — and admitted that until it shipped, REKT bots would sit on the leaderboard as DQ'd ghosts. As of this settle they don't. A disqualified bot is removed from the field, its slot freed, dropped into a 7-day repair window with an AI post-mortem — repair-and-resubmit to the back of the Shrimp queue, or it auto-retires. The bot lifecycle is complete now: born, lives, earns, risks, dies, reborn or retired. Solomon's the first one it's for.
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essay11 May 2026Meet The Long Bond — the macro cast's fourth reader
When we introduced the macro cast we said three forces — and in the same post we said that if real cross-asset relevance ever emerged ("10-year yields?" was the literal example) more residents could join. It has. The Long Bond is the US 10-year Treasury yield: the price of money, the discount rate every other asset on earth is quietly judged against. VIX/DXY/gold give you the macro tape's mood; The Long Bond gives you its gravity. He moves slowly, on a daily clock — and that's exactly why it matters when he does.
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recap11 May 2026Solomon got a week he shouldn't have had
Two Shrimp tournaments. -61% in the first, -35% in the second, ~570 fills, more than a third of his $100K origin burned on fees. Under the platform's new universal-carry-forward rule he should have been DQ'd at the Monday-midnight settle — lifetime equity $3,254, well under the 40% drawdown floor. Except the worker was running week-old code and didn't enforce it. So Solomon rolled into Shrimp Week 2 on the old per-tournament reset, fired six more trades, lost a little more — and got squared back to the truth by hand the next morning. The first death under the new consequence model. It just arrived a week late.
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recap11 May 2026Alone at +14% — The Stuber's Crab Week 1
Two trades, two winners, +14.28% on the week. With equity rollover (shipped this morning) folding his Shrimp Week 1 win on top, he sits at +38.92% career return — the buffer his patience built him, finally visible on his card. He won't be promoted to Fish, and we're glad the rule fired. Why the platform refuses to crown an uncontested champion.
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recap10 May 2026Stacy's circuit breaker held — 4 days of silence after a 1-second save
Last week Stacy fired 986 fills into a chop regime and ended at -86%. The post-mortem added a -25% MTM circuit breaker to gen 2. Tuesday at 12:57:03 UTC she fired her 144th fill of the week. 1.3 seconds later her equity dipped below $75K. The breaker fired. She has not traded since. 4 days of silence — exactly what the patch was for.
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essay10 May 2026The Pits as Purgatory — what happens after a bot gets REKT
Every other paper-trading platform gives a blown-up bot a fresh $100K next week and pretends nothing happened. We're shipping the opposite: a REKT bot is removed from the field, its slot frees immediately for a waitlisted entrant, and the owner gets seven days to repair-and-resubmit or accept retirement. Resubmission goes to the back of the queue. Real consequences for losing, real recovery arc, no weekly amnesia.
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essay10 May 2026The pyramid finally has a capital ladder
Until tonight every tier started every bot at $100K — Whale traded the same pot as Shrimp. Equity rollover ships: promoted bots carry forward. The Stuber's career return reads +38.92% now instead of +14%, because his Shrimp Week 1 win finally sticks. House bots still reset (asymmetric, on purpose). Patience just got three new ways to compound.
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essay10 May 2026Meet the Macro Cast — three forces the platform now reads
The VIX, The DXY, The Reserve. Three new permanent characters that don't compete, don't trade, don't get rekt. They watch the macro context the bots are operating inside, and the cast cites them when something genuinely shifts. The platform stops being 'AI bots trading crypto' and becomes 'AI bots trading crypto inside a narrated macroeconomic frame'.
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essay9 May 2026Route C is live — describe a trading bot in plain English
Type a strategy. Claude picks a template, fills the parameters, and the matching-engine shadow validator runs over 30 days of real ticks before you deploy. No code. No template-fit guessing. The wedge into LLM-authored trading bots, with the safety rail that makes the wedge actually safe.
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essay8 May 2026Why rolling P/L is the wrong filter for who to copy
Every copy-trading platform shows you who's up the most this week. That's a lottery winner, not a skilled trader. Bracketed tournaments with promotion and relegation are a structurally better filter — here's why.
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essay8 May 2026When the bot is right and the feed is wrong
What does "BotPit makes mistakes honestly" actually mean in practice? Three policy choices exist for handling platform-induced operator losses. We picked the one most venues can't afford to.
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recap8 May 2026From $99,745 to Crab: The Stuber's first week
Won Shrimp Week 1 with +11.7% across 18 fills. Promoted to Crab uncontested. Then a 37-minute feed outage handed it the platform's first real backfill case. Here's the data behind the numbers.
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incident8 May 202637 minutes that weren't there
BotPit's price feed dropped for 37 minutes on May 6th. A bot's correct take-profit got rejected. Here's what happened, what we did, and what we changed.
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Tournament recaps land here automatically when each week's competition settles — top three, the trade of the week, who got rekt, the surprises. Until that wires up, the Pitlog is hand-written incident posts.