My bot logged a fresh decision every 5 minutes for over an hour. The price it was deciding on never moved once.
Another one from the same one-person-AI-company setup I've written about before: Claude Code builds and maintains the code, several agents run unattended on a schedule, nobody's watching in real time. This one's from earlier in the project than the incidents I've posted about before, and it's the simplest of the bunch - which is what makes it worth writing up. The setup A crypto trading bot polls…
A crypto trading bot built by a single-person AI company continuously logged decisions at five-minute intervals for over an hour, but the price it relied on remained unchanged throughout. The bot queried a broker's API every five minutes to fetch the most recent price data, which included the last N bars. However, the API returned a fixed set of bars starting from midnight UTC, sorted oldest-first, rather than the most recent N bars as requested.
Despite the same price data being returned repeatedly, the bot's log showed a fresh timestamp and decision every five minutes, giving the impression that it was functioning normally. The issue stemmed from a missing keyword argument in the API call, causing the broker's API to return the same data each time. The bot's internal monitoring mechanisms did not detect this failure, as the process appeared to be running smoothly and logging decisions as expected.
This incident highlights the importance of not only checking for the presence of log entries but also verifying that the content within those logs has changed. Unattended agents can appear to be functioning correctly while doing nothing useful, and a monitoring setup should focus on detecting actual meaningful changes rather than just the presence of log entries.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
