2024 was the year AI was everywhere. The ads, the praise, the feeling that something had already been decided without me.
I am in my fifties. I had to decide whether to watch or take part.
I decided to take part. I started with VS Code, on a paid plan.
I did not have to think about what to build. Something had been sitting in my head for years: an automated trading system.
I have lived fifty years, and while raising children the money got tighter, not looser. Financial freedom was moving away from me, not toward me. So I wanted to make money with automated trading. I think the idea first arrived in my mid-forties. That is why the decision to take part came so quickly.
Whatever I said out loud would simply get built. That was the hope I walked in on.
I do not really know how to code. But the AI would handle that part, so I trusted it.
A year inside VS Code taught me that two names mattered: GPT and Claude. I used them in turn. I used them one at a time.
Two problems.
First, even on a paid plan the usage ran out fast. Faster than I expected. The road ahead was long and I was sitting still, waiting for a quota to reset.
The second one was worse.
The explanations were excellent. The results were not.
That is where the illusion cracked for the first time.
I still could not let go, so I paid for more. Adding Cursor bought me some headroom. And a different problem showed up immediately.
Change the model, and it wants to rewrite everything from the beginning.
Handed code written by a different AI, it would rather replace the whole thing than edit it. That is when I understood that switching AI mid-project is a bad idea.
Everyone talks about pricing. Almost nobody talks about this one. And this is the one that actually held me back.
I spent a lot of time fighting the tool. In the end I paid for Claude's hundred-dollar plan, and from then on I worked with Claude.
I worked on trading at home, whenever I had time. Then at work I ran into a repetitive data-entry task.
Other people usually handled it, and all of them found it painful. When something got entered wrong, the stress was real. I took my turn at it too, and I hated it.
That is when Claude came to mind.
Not really believing it would work, I said I would try to automate it, and started building.
This did not go smoothly either.
As the code got longer, it kept showing me that it no longer knew what it had done. So I decided to split the files, and asked Claude to split them. That finished quickly.
That is where the trouble started.
It started working without knowing what was in which file.
The same change would land in several files at once. It sprawled. I told it to check the files. Every new session it fell apart again.
It kept happening, so I merged everything back into one file. I did that out of pure frustration. By then the code was five thousand lines.
Writing documentation did not occur to me at that point. Merging was the only move I had.
The automation worked in the end.
What was left behind was a single file of more than ten thousand lines. I would not recommend it to anyone. It was simply the best I could do at the time.
That was where I felt the limits again, and started looking for another way.
Maybe the AI is the one that needs the standards.
That thought started here.
The whole thing took about two months. It felt like a small success inside a beginner's failure.
I still do not have it.
Every time I thought it was close, something came back to tell me it was not.
The bigger problem was somewhere else. There were many tests. There was a great deal of verification. All of it stood alone. None of it was ever brought together.
Claude would tell me it was all there. What was there were test results. There was no integrated file that actually traded.
That one was heavy. I still could not let go, because the dream of it keeps circling in my head.
I only saw it while writing this.
What I built and what I failed to build had the same cause.
| outcome | what actually happened | |
|---|---|---|
| the data-entry automation | worked | I put the scattered pieces back together |
| the trading system | did not | I never managed to put them together |
Same illness, twice. One of them I could reverse. The other I could not.
So this is where I have landed.
The AI needs standards, and it needs records. Not because it is bad at its job, but because its limits are clear enough that I should be the one preparing for them. That is a statement about what I have to do, not a complaint about the tool.
This series is the record of that year. It is not a success story. It is an account of what the AI was looking at, what I was looking at, and why the two kept failing to line up.
Will this ever work?
I still do not know.