Spent the last month building a Polymarket arbitrage bot from scratch—zero coding experience going in, and today it finally hit profitability.

Turns out you don't need a CS degree to ship. With Claude, Gemini, and enough patience to debug, you can genuinely build complex things. The learning curve was steeper than expected, but the AI tools made it feel almost collaborative rather than confrontational.

The bot started slow, operating in the 1-3 second range for market detection and execution. That latency window was brutal at first. Tweaking the logic, optimizing the queries, running constant iterations—each pass got tighter.

Now that it's printing money, the obvious lesson hits different: barriers to entry in this space aren't what they used to be. If you can think through a problem and communicate it clearly to an AI, you can turn that into working code. The playing field shifted.