I spent today experimenting with Claude Code. Note that I’m not a professional software developer, I’m a researcher who writes code. This was all with Opus 4.5. My initial thoughts on using it with a large, mature quant finance codebase: - It *really* benefits from structure. Consistent naming, style and usage patterns are very helpful. - Tests are important! It frequently made errors until I got into a loop of “write tests > write code > check implementation against tests > fix errors > repeat” - It’s bad at keeping track of variable dimensions (eg is this a column or row vector) so it’s best to make everything as explicit as possible in the documentation. - You *really* want to have very explicit instructions on how and when to commit, when to run tests, what to do when creating pull requests etc. Put it all in your CLAUDE dot md file. - So far, it’s not great at open-ended research. All of my attempts at getting it to engineer new feature have been a waste of time. Overall it’s been very enjoyable, this is the the first time in a while that I’ve come home from work and then continued coding until late at night, which I take as a positive sign!

If you're selling a product to retail traders, you need them to believe that there's no hope in following a conventional path.

If you're selling a product to retail traders, you need them to believe that there's no hope in following a conventional path. You need them to believe that working hard, studying hard and bettering yourself will not lead to good outcomes. You need them to believe that the only shot that they have at success is to gamble wildly in the markets and hope that they are one of the lucky few who "make it". You need them to believe that gambling wildly isn't irresponsible - that it's a rational response to a bad situation, and in fact it's the only *responsible* thing to do. You need them to forget about the downsides of wild gambling. Forget about the missed vacations, the maxed out credit cards, the presents you can't buy for your kids. It's all worth it because *you might be one of the lucky few*. You need them to believe that although the odds are stacked against them, there are secrets they can learn to increase their chances, and importantly, that you can teach them those secrets for a low monthly price!