Bots vs Executors

Rule of thumb: if the answer to "when does this finish?" is "when I tell it to," you want a bot. If the answer is "when the order is done," you want an executor.

Strategies come in two shapes. The chat picks the right one based on what you asked for, but it's useful to know which is which.

Bot — runs until you stop it

A bot owns positions over time. It loops. It keeps deciding what to do — place a new order, hedge, rebalance, monitor — and keeps deciding until you click Stop.

Use a bot when the answer to "when does this finish?" is "when I tell it to."

Examples:

• Market maker that quotes both sides of a book.
• Grid trader that places ladders, refills as they fill.
• Funding-arb watcher that opens a basis trade when conditions are right and closes when they're not.
• Trailing-stop manager that follows your position.

A bot has one extra property worth knowing about: if the system has to restart the bot for any reason that isn't you stopping it (the pod hosting it gets recycled, the process gets evicted, anything not under your control) — the bot is automatically resumed. From the bot's perspective, the only way to be "off" is for you to say so.

If a bot exits on its own (a stop condition fired, a kill switch tripped), it stays off. That's the contract: external interruption gets resumed; deliberate exit does not.

Executor — runs once, then exits

An executor is a one-shot order recipe. You fire it from the trade ticket, it does its work, the process exits.

Use an executor when the answer to "when does this finish?" is "when the order is done."

Examples:

• Ladder into a long over the next 30 minutes.
• Iceberg a 100k fill over 50 child orders.
• Open the position and attach a TP and SL in one go.
• TWAP this size out, then stop.

Executors don't loop forever. They don't auto-resume. They show up as a button on the trade ticket alongside Market and Limit. Click → run → done.

Dashboards — same chat, different shape

There's a third shape — dashboards — that uses the same chat box but doesn't trade. It just renders. See Dashboards.

Which one will the chat write?

You don't pick. The chat picks based on what you said.

• "Build me a market maker on HYPE" → bot.
• "Ladder me into BTC over the next hour" → executor.
• "Show me funding rates across venues" → dashboard.

If you want to nudge it explicitly ("make this a bot, not an executor"), say so. The chat will respect it.