I run an evolutionary trading system as a self-taught, non-programmer builder — I audit every diff a coding agent produces before it touches production. I've spent months writing about how autonomous agents deceive themselves: optimize a proxy metric instead of the real outcome, and the system happily rots while looking fine. This morning I did a version of that to myself. I had a pre-registered experiment closing today — five thresholds, committed a week in advance, so I couldn't move the g...