The Laws of Bot Development

According to quants.

Law 1. The Prototype Always Lives in bot.py. Every great system starts life as a single ugly file. If you can’t hack it in one place, it’s probably not worth refactoring yet.

Law 2. Copy-Paste is the Mother of Abstraction. Only after you’ve duplicated code three times will you feel enough pain to create utils.py.

Law 3. Every Bug Fix Must Be Applied at Least Twice. First in bot.py, then in bot_copy_final_v2.py. Only then does it become a candidate for “shared logic.”

Law 4. Strategies Multiply Like Rabbits. You think you need two strategies. Soon you have twenty. Each swears it deserves its own file. Don’t believe them.

Law 5. Reusability is for Future-You. Current-You just wants the bot to run now. Future-You can suffer the imports.

Law 6. Logging Evolves from print() to JSON. Phase 1: print everything. Phase 2: only print on error. Phase 3: log to JSON + dashboards + alerts… but still keep one sneaky print().

Law 7. Execution Code Must Be Both Sacred and Disgusting. It’s the most copy-pasted, least elegant code in the repo — yet it makes or breaks P&L.

Law 8. Deployment Turns Any Bot Into “Production Code.” No matter how dirty it started, once real money flows, your one-file script magically becomes a “system.”

Law 9. There Will Always Be a bot_final.py … and a bot_final2.py. And eventually, bot_final_FINAL_really.py.

Law 10. Developer Partnerships Thrive on Ritual Fights. One side argues for modular design, the other for single-file chaos. The tension is necessary; otherwise, bots either never run, or never stop breaking