How everyday US investors are vibe-coding algorithms to automate trading strategies by connecting their stock portfolios to AI agents built with Claude or Codex (Hannah Erin Lang/Wall Street Journal)
Americans are vibe-coding trading algorithms and handing over their stock portfolios to AI agents. Welcome to the world of the robot retail investor.
From February to April 2026, the author launched four web apps, each beginning with a code bundle generated by Figma Make, an AI feature that creates a working front-end code bundle from a design. Each repository started with a finished look and a fixed version of dependencies, such as Next.js 15.3.4, React 19.1.0, and Tailwind CSS 3.2.0.
The repositories varied in their progress toward development. The beauty-curation site went the furthest, being transformed into a static site hosted on AWS Amplify. The gift-record app and plush-toy album stalled at the data layer, missing key features such as data persistence, authentication, and notifications. The UI mock for an AI development tool remained a mock, as its purpose was to create a look for reviewing the UI.
The author unified these repositories onto a single self-hosted security CI system to improve consistency and governance across all projects.
Written by urgent.news from Dev.to's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
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