I Built a 4,000-Line Production Trading Bot With Claude Code

Originally published at chudi.dev I finished Polyphemus in 6 weeks. It's a fully autonomous Polymarket trading bot. 4,000+ lines, Kelly Criterion position sizing, real money on the line. I couldn't have shipped it without Claude Code. I also wasted $340 in one month using it wrong before I figured out what actually works. This is not a "Claude Code tips" post. This is the case study of building a production system — what went wrong first, what I built to fix it, and the five principles that came out the other side. Why Does Claude Get Dumber as Your Project Gets Bigger? Every Claude Code guide starts with CLAUDE.md tips. Not wrong, just backwards. The first thing I had to understand was not "how do I write better prompts." It was: why does Claude get dumber as my project gets bigger? The answer is the context window. Every session loads your project into Claude's working memory. As your codebase grows, that memory fills up faster. By week three of Polyphemus, I was spending 20 minutes