Yesterday I shipped 3 PRs to my trading bot. Tests passed. CI green. Merged to main. Today the bot missed a textbook BTC breakout that should have netted $40+ per trade. Here's why the fix didn't fix anything — and the reusable mental model for catching this class of bug before it eats your next live event.
Your stability gate is silently killing every breakout entry. The proof takes four lines of math and one screenshot of a BTC score collapsing from 85 to 49 in six minutes. This is not a tuning problem. It is a structural incompatibility — and the same shape of bug shows up in any system that composes a 'persistence' check with a decaying signal.
The broker was live. The fleet was registered. Every request returned 401. The distance between 'deployed' and 'operational' is where most systems quietly die.
FILTER_5M_DISABLED = False. One line. Should've been the whole story. Instead it kicked off a six-bug root cause chain that exposed every assumption we had about how our trading bot actually found markets — and taught us the most important rule in API integration.