Tape: the proof-carrying options desk

Tape is an autonomous options desk on Alpaca paper that prints a serial-numbered receipt for everything it does, then reconciles its own journal against the broker every cycle. Live: tape.up.railway.app AI logic: a Groq analyst reads desk state and the option chain and proposes defined-risk credit spreads with its thesis attached. The model proposes only: sizing, gates and flattens are deterministic code. A nightly scribe grades closed trades into lessons that feed later cycles (10 on record, including the ones that hurt). Risk gates: 13 deterministic gates run before any order exists: 2.5% NAV per trade, 20% aggregate open risk, 4% daily halt, delta band 0.10-0.40, max 5 DTE, liquidity, pin guards, Friday flatten. 33 gate runs on record: 11 approved, 22 blocked with the exact gate that killed each. Alpaca infrastructure: the agent speaks to Alpaca through the official MCP server over stdio; every tool call is journaled (15,138 calls with full payloads). Orders execute as multi-leg submissions with fill verification before journaling. A reconcile pass every cycle compares the journal against get_all_positions: clean stamps on record for every cycle of the submission account (PA37YPE0PC51). The spine is honesty: on day two the desk froze, held 0-DTE spreads into expiry and the first account died at -$54,152. It was archived as a receipt chain, the failure became lessons, and the fresh book now trades with fill verification and a public reconcile wall. A Sep 3 expiry left -200 SPY short stock on the book at submission time: receipted, marked live, flattened by the Friday rule.