Self-hosting with your AI assistant

Self-hosting means the engine runs on a machine you control and your trading key never leaves it. You do not set it up yourself. You give an AI coding assistant Archon’s runbook, a step-by-step instruction file written for assistants, and it does the work, telling you after each step what it did.

Which assistant

Any assistant that can run commands on the machine works. Archon’s runbook is written and tested for:

• Claude Code, from Anthropic.
• Codex, from OpenAI.

Install one on the machine that will run Archon, or on a machine that can reach it over SSH.

Which machine

The engine only protects the account while it runs. Choose, in order of preference:

1. A small cloud server. Always on, always online, nothing to remember. The smallest size any provider offers is enough.
2. A desktop that never sleeps.
3. A Mac laptop, only if it stays plugged in and awake. Ask your assistant to keep it awake while on power.

Run one engine per Hyperliquid account. Two engines on one account each think they own it, and every position doubles.

Getting the runbook

Sign in to the app, choose a rule, and open Run it. It shows a one-line prompt for your assistant. That prompt points the assistant at a runbook personalised to your account and your chosen rule. Paste it into the assistant in an empty folder and let it start.

What the assistant will ask you

Two values, and only these:

1. Your Hyperliquid account address: 0x followed by 40 characters.
2. Your API wallet private key: 0x followed by 64 characters. Connect Hyperliquid shows where to get it.

It checks the format of each before using it.

The rules it follows

The runbook gives the assistant rules that override everything else in it:

• Never ask for, accept, store or print a seed phrase or a main wallet’s private key. If you offer one, it refuses.
• Testnet first. It does not move to mainnet unless you tell it to, in your own words, after the engine has run on testnet.
• Secrets stay on disk. The API key goes where the engine reads it and nowhere else: not in logs, not echoed back, not committed anywhere.
• No promises of profit. If you ask whether it will make money, it tells you the truth: the rules were tested on past data, and that is not a forecast.

Ask your agent anything

This is the main advantage of self-hosting with an assistant: you have a patient expert on hand who can read the whole of these docs in seconds.

Give it the plain-text version of the docs:

Read https://archon.quest/llms-full.txt and use it to answer my questions about Archon.

Then ask in your own words. For example:

• “Is the engine running right now? What did it do today?”
• “Why did it sell ETH this morning?”
• “The dashboard says UNDERSIZED. What does that mean and what should I do?”
• “I’m away for three weeks. Should I pause, close everything, or leave it?”
• “Walk me through moving to mainnet with only $5,000 of the account.”
• “Explain the 30% halt like I’ve never traded before.”

Ask your agent

When something looks wrong, paste the exact line from the engine’s output into your assistant and ask what it means. Every line the engine can write is explained in Troubleshooting, and your assistant can read that page too.

Day to day

Ask the assistant, in plain words, to:

You want to	Say something like
See what happened	“Show me what the engine did since yesterday”
Stop adding positions, keep exits	“Pause new positions”
Be flat now	“Close all positions and keep them closed”
Carry on after a halt	“I’ve looked at why it halted. Re-arm it”
Change the rule or the slots	“Switch to Breadth Trend 150 with 16 slots”
Update Archon	“Update Archon to the latest version and restart it”
Move to a new machine	“Stop the engine here; I’m moving it” first, then set up on the new one

Controls explains exactly what each of these does to your account.

When the assistant is not enough

If your assistant cannot resolve a problem from the docs, ask it to collect the engine’s recent output and the exact error, without the API key, and send that to support@archon.quest with the wallet you signed in with.