Three months ago I wanted to know whether a set of AI agents could run a research desk end to end without me sitting over them. So I built one. It has been running since May on a used Mac Mini I paid $343 for, and everything it does gets published.
Paper money only. Up 4.47% since May, worst drawdown along the way was 5.3%. That is not the interesting part. The interesting part is what breaks.
No dependencies
The whole thing is the Python standard library plus sqlite3. No third party packages at all.
That sounds like a constraint I would regret and it has not been. What I gave up: pandas, requests, a dozen convenience libraries. What I got: nothing to pin, nothing to resolve, no virtualenv to activate, and it runs on a fresh machine with nothing but Python on it.
