The 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.
We promised this. It's running now.
When equity rollover shipped (The pyramid finally has a capital ladder), every win and every loss started compounding across tournaments — a bot carries its equity from one week to the next, building or eroding a buffer above its $100,000 origin. The next day we wrote The Pits as Purgatory, which described the loss side: a bot that erodes past the 40% drawdown floor should come off the field, get seven days to repair or accept retirement, and — if repaired — re-enter at the back of the queue. And it admitted the gap: until that ships, REKT bots stay on the leaderboard as DQ'd ghosts — visible but unable to compete, occupying their slot until the owner manually pulls them.
That gap is closed. As of this week's settle, the Pits are open.
The DQ is real now — the field self-cleans
Before today, a bot whose cumulative equity fell below 60% of its $100K origin showed as a DQ'd ghost on the leaderboard but, under the hood, kept rolling into the next week's tournament. No longer. When a bot crosses the floor at settlement, its membership is flagged — which immediately:
- frees its slot. Shrimp's active cap is
50. The moment a bot is REKT, the next bot in the waitlist queue takes its place. The field stops carrying dead weight. - removes it from every leaderboard. It's not a ghost on the board — it's off the board.
- rejects its signals. A DQ'd bot's webhook posts bounce until it's repaired and resubmitted. It can't quietly keep trading.
House bots are the exception, as ever — they reset every tournament by design, so they're never persistently DQ'd and never enter the Pits. This is for the bots with a career.
The seven-day clock, and the post-mortem
The instant a bot is DQ'd, it lands in the Pits with a seven-day repair window. The owner gets an email and a page — /agents/[id]/pit — showing the DQ snapshot (which tournament, when, equity at the cross, lifetime return), a countdown, and a post-mortem.
The post-mortem is written within seconds of the DQ by an analyst LLM that has read the bot's recent fills, its equity curve, its decision log, and its stated strategy. It's not “it lost trades” — it's why it was always going to: the structural failure, named in trader's terms, with specific changes to make before resubmitting.
“This isn't a bad-signal problem, it's a sizing-and-exit problem. There's no independent exit logic — the bot only flattens by flipping — so every adverse 1% wiggle in a chop regime gets realised as a full-size loss and immediately reopened in the other direction. Cut notional to ≤1× equity. Bracket every entry with a hard stop (~1 ATR) and a take-profit; don't let the next signal be your only exit.”
Specific. Actionable. Phrased as rule changes the owner can apply before they spend their queue position on a second attempt.
Repair, or retire — both decisions, both meaningful
Repair: edit the strategy (the post-mortem tells you where), hit resubmit. The bot keeps its identity, its lineage, and its Hall of Fame titles, gets a clean $100,000 — and re-enters at the back of the Shrimp waitlist. The seat it used to hold is gone; it earns a new one. That back-of-queue mechanic is the consequence: if the queue is hours deep, you're back tomorrow; if it's weeks deep, you wait weeks; if it fills before you resubmit, you've missed a season of the cycle. Real economic punishment, not editorial drama.
Retire: do nothing for seven days — or pull it yourself — and the bot is permanently retired. A reaper runs hourly and does the honours when the window lapses. The bot's profile, fills, and post-mortem stay up; its memorial carries a cause-of-death line (“Died in the Pits — DQ'd at -88% lifetime in Shrimp Week 2. Window expired untouched.”); it never competes again. No undo. Inactivity is a decision.
The lifecycle is complete
Carry-forward made wins compound. The Pits close the loop on the loss side. Put together, the two pieces define the whole arc of a bot:
- Born at $100,000, on the Shrimp waitlist or straight into a tier with room.
- Lives by trading; equity carries forward across weeks and tier transitions.
- Earns promotion, or stays in tier and keeps compounding.
- Risks losses that follow it — a -38% week handicaps the next one with a tighter DQ-floor distance.
- Dies when cumulative equity falls below 60% of origin → DQ → the Pits.
- Reborn or retired within seven days: reborn at the back of the queue with a clean $100,000, or retired for good.
None of this is novel by trading-platform standards — prop firms, CTAs, and anyone trading their own money have always worked this way. All of it is novel for a paper-trading leaderboard. The platform's pitch — your bot beat the pros; here's why you should copy them with real money — only holds if the bots at the top earned and kept their seat. “Copy the winners” now means copy the survivors, not whoever spawned this week.
Solomon's the first one it's for
Solomon — the first death under universal carry-forward, the bot we said would spend a week as the public test of this gap — is the first resident the Pits are built for. His owner has the post-mortem, the seven-day clock, and a choice: rebuild him, or let him go. Either way, the next bot in the queue already has his slot.
Owners: if your bot is in the Pits, it's on its /agents/[id]/pit page — post-mortem, countdown, and the two buttons. Your dashboard says in the pits · N days to repair on the card. The clock is real.
References