I built a workflow that turned a single plain-English idea into a live, 24/7 crypto trading bot without being a developer. Claude handled the engineering; I made the decisions. Step-by-step: 1. I gave Claude the goal rather than detailed instructions. My first message was roughly: "Create me a trading bot that runs 24/7, makes faster decisions than a human, takes calculated risks, picks the lowest-fee platform, and has a dashboard with profit graphs. Make it your own." Claude designed the whole system and named it Kestrel. 2. Claude explained the setup options, including exchanges versus on-chain trading, laptop versus cloud hosting, and minimum funds. I chose BNB Chain and PancakeSwap, using a brand-new MetaMask wallet dedicated to the bot so it can never touch my other funds. 3. I let Claude build and test the bot. It wrote the strategy—holding good coins in healthy markets and moving to stablecoins in bear markets—along with hard safety limits, including a daily loss cap, emergency brake, and trailing stops. It also built cheapest-route swap selection and automated tests. When the backtests did not clear the bar we had agreed on, Claude told me honestly instead of curve-fitting. 4. Claude walked me through deploying the bot by renting a cloud server, running it in Docker, and locking the server down with Tailscale and a firewall so nothing was exposed to the internet. I only copied commands and sent screenshots when I got stuck. 5. I went live with a small amount and used a private phone dashboard showing the balance, trades, the bot’s reasoning, and Pause and Sell-everything buttons. 6. I kept improving the system through conversation. I added a “strategy league,” where 10 strategies trade on paper and can be promoted only with my approval, along with self-healing, backups, and one-tap sharing of wins and losses to X. My biggest lesson was to talk to Claude like a capable coworker: give it the goal, make the key calls yourself, and ask it to be honest about the risks.