Vibe coded a 24/7 algo trading bot with Claude, a $5 Linux server, and free government data — no finance background, just curiosity and Claude

Been deep in a build for the past few weeks and finally have something worth posting about.

Started with a simple question: is there publicly available data that prediction markets aren't pricing correctly? Turns out yes. Won't say what — but it's free, government-published, and updates every x amount of minutes.

Here's what the stack looks like:

The build:

• OpenClaw as the AI agent brain
• Claude Sonnet 4.6 as the reasoning layer
• Custom signal scoring engine with 6 weighted factors
• Executes automatically on a regulated US prediction market
• Runs on a $5/month Linux VPS 24/7
• Telegram alerts every time it finds an edge or places a trade
• Built-in circuit breaker that kills trading if daily losses hit a threshold

What surprised me:

• The hardest part wasn't the code — it was learning Linux terminal from scratch while building
• Free data sources are wildly underutilized. Everyone's chasing expensive data feeds
• OpenRouter saved us when we started hitting API rate limits and cost issues — routes cheap calls to budget models and only uses the heavy model when it actually needs to reason
• Paper trading revealing signal flaws I never would have caught otherwise

Where we're at now: Live on the server, signals running, working through rate limit optimization with OpenRouter. Next step is a monitoring dashboard and potentially opening it up as a service.

Whole thing was built conversationally with Claude. Genuinely didn't write most of the code myself — described what I wanted, iterated, debugged together. That's the vibe coding experience in a nutshell.

Happy to talk about the build process, the server setup, OpenClaw, or the OpenRouter routing strategy. Not sharing the signal logic obviously — but everything else is fair game.

What are you all building?