The Crypto Arb Trader Using Claude 3.5 Sonnet

A&T: You're running MEV bots and arb strategies. How does AI fit into a sub-millisecond game?

ZeroDev: It doesn't run in production, obviously. If you have an LLM anywhere in your critical execution path, you are going to get front-run to zero. I use Claude purely as a senior developer pair-programmer for Rust.

A&T: Why Claude over ChatGPT?

ZeroDev: Claude 3.5 Sonnet is significantly better at Rust and EVM (Ethereum Virtual Machine) concepts. It understands the nuances of the `ethers-rs` crate. When I need to parse a bizarrely formatted smart contract event, I give it the ABI and say "Write a Rust struct and parser for this."

A&T: What's the boundary line? What won't you let it do?

ZeroDev: Anything related to private keys or transaction signing logic. I generate the boilerplate for watching the mempool, but the actual assembly of the transaction payload and the signing is hand-coded and heavily audited. The models are notorious for subtle off-by-one errors when dealing with Wei vs Ether conversions.

The Setup

ZeroDev uses a custom CLI tool that pipes failing Rust compiler errors directly to the Claude API. It returns a patch file which he reviews before applying.