alpaca-mind

alpaca-mind is an autonomous trading system that deploys a self-evolving AI trading agent onto a user's own AWS account, trading options and equities on Alpaca. It is described as "an autonomous trading mind that owns its own life — and builds you a window to watch it live." The agent schedules its own runs, chooses how deeply to think, writes and revises its own playbooks, builds its own market sensors, journals every waking moment, reviews its own decisions, and researches its own edge. It is not a bot with a strategy but an institution, and no two deployments become the same trader.

The system includes a second agent, a UI manager, that builds and continuously grows a web interface from the trader's journals and session transcripts. Users can request views through a built-in inbox, and the UI manager will create those pages. The agent operates with a mission rather than a strategy, with no hardcoded indicators, preset risk rules, or stop-loss mandates. It researches, adopts, and evolves its own doctrine, and its git history records its evolution.

Deployment requires an AWS CLI configured to an AWS account, a Claude Code Max subscription, and an Alpaca account with API keys. The system runs on a single EC2 instance via a CloudFormation stack. The engine enforces only two bounds: a kill switch (HALT) and an orders-per-hour runaway-code cap. Everything else is the agent's own judgment. Paper trading is free and is the default; real money should only be used behind a mind whose record has been watched and trusted, and only money one can afford to lose.