Originally published at forgemesh.io. The kit itself lives at forgemesh.io/kronos/field-guide.
Kronos is a market-intelligence and paper-trading system we run on a VPS: an open-source foundation model that scores 17 crypto pairs and 22 stocks every hour, an institutional overlay from 13F filings, a technical layer, a macro layer, a risk engine with position caps and cooldowns, a broker connection for paper orders, and a log of every decision it makes. It has been running unattended since June.
Building that by hand is months of work for a developer. We know, because that is how long it took us, across a lot of sessions, with a coding agent doing most of the typing.
So we did not write a tutorial. We wrote the brief.
What "bring a coding agent" means here
The Kronos Field Guide is a build kit written for a person who directs a coding agent rather than one who types every line. You paste the brief into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor or whatever you run. The agent asks the questions a senior engineer would ask before building a trading system: which universe, which regime rules, how many positions, when to trim, when to stop, what counts as done. The kit exists so you can answer those questions instead of guessing.
A coding agent is highly encouraged. It is not required, but every part of the kit assumes one:
- Two coding-agent briefs. One for a first build, one for a mandate-driven build if you already trade or manage risk.
- 81 explained settings. Every configuration field the engine reads, what it does, what changing it changes, and what we set and why.
- Acceptance scenarios. Concrete tests that tell you whether the agent's build is actually finished, including replaying a recorded decision.
- Sanitized data and offline validation tools. Test the build without a broker account or live market data.
- Seven annotated figures and the case files. What broke in ours, in detail.
- The ebook as PDF and self-contained offline HTML, hardware and VM planning, a model-installation walkthrough, and a paper-operation runbook.
Model weights and upstream source are downloaded separately. It is a specification and learning resource, not a finished trading application.
We show what broke, on purpose
Most build guides show the demo that worked. This one ships the log.
Our captured forecast outcomes show 49.8% directional accuracy, which is not a demonstrated profitable edge. The latest captured paper-account value was $94,840.62 against an initial $100,000. The raw log records a $40,367 peak-to-trough difference in July that rebounded the following hour and remains unreconciled.
The case files explain a trailing-peak reset bug, rejected broker orders, a position deadlock, and a replay that could not reproduce the recorded decisions. Each one cost us days. Each one is written up so your agent does not repeat it. That is the part of the kit we think is worth the money.
Who this is for
Vibecoders and builders who want a working market-signal system of their own and would rather direct the build than hand-code it. Two paths in: one if finance or code is new to you, with worked examples first; one if you already define mandates and risk budgets and want to go straight to the mandate brief. Coding experience is not assumed on either.
The honest part
Educational only. Not financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Trading can lose all committed capital. Paper results do not predict live outcomes. Personal use, no redistribution, sold as-is, no support of any kind. If that is a dealbreaker, the free preview of Chapter 2 is at forgemesh.io/kronos/field-guide/preview and costs nothing.
Launch price $19 through September 15, 2026, then $29.
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