
1
1
United States
20+ years of experience
Applications architect, 25+ years across defense, healthcare, and enterprise, primarily Microsoft stack. Founder of Joticle, a vertical SaaS holding company, and author of FlowState Engineering, an open-source methodology for AI-assisted software delivery (fstate.dev). Interested in agent architecture and how far you can push autonomy while keeping it accountable.

Every automated trading system enforces its risk limits in software. Tell it to close a position at a 3% loss and that instruction is a line of code like any other — it inherits every weakness code has. It fills where the market actually is, not where you asked. It never fires if there's a bug. Nothing happens at all if the connection drops overnight. The limit was never a guarantee. It was an intention, and intentions fail under exactly the conditions where they matter most. Uncharted Options takes the limit out of the software entirely. The agent trades one instrument class: defined-risk vertical spreads. Both legs go in as a single multi-leg order, so maximum loss is fixed the instant the order is constructed and enforced by the broker and the OCC. A crashed process can't widen it. A stalled data feed can't widen it. A bug in the exit logic can't widen it. The risk ceiling stops being a promise the software makes and becomes a property of what it holds. Two exposure gates handle the rest: 3% maximum risk per position, 5% maximum exposure per underlying, measured against equity — never buying power, which on a margin account reports four times equity and would silently quadruple every trade. The dashboard leads with what the agent refused. Every candidate it declined, with the gate that stopped it — because a refusal exists nowhere in broker data, and if we didn't record it, it wouldn't exist. It refuses to stay in, too. On September 2 it closed both open positions unattended, logging: "SPY at $762.95 is inside the $762.50-$770.50 pin zone with 1d to expiry. Closing rather than gambling on where it settles." It took a small loss rather than carry unbounded assignment risk overnight. Nobody told it to. Built on .NET 10, executing through the Alpaca CLI. Live: https://uncharted-options.vercel.app
4 Sep 2026