What is the best AI for building a crypto trading bot?

Short answer: "best" depends on whether you want the AI to help you write the bot or make the trading decisions itself — those are very different jobs, and I'll separate them because it changes the answer.

1. AI as your coding copilot (the practical, safer use) Most people building a bot today use an LLM to generate and debug the code, while the actual trading logic stays deterministic:

• Claude / GPT-4 / Gemini — all good at writing Python, explaining strategy logic, and reviewing code for bugs. Pick whichever you're comfortable with; they're roughly comparable for this job. Claude tends to be strong at long multi-file projects, GPT at broad tooling knowledge.
• Code-specific tools (Cursor, GitHub Copilot) layer the same models into an editor with your repo context — genuinely useful for a multi-file bot project.
• The real workhorse stack has nothing to do with AI: ccxt (connects to 100+ exchanges with one API), pandas/numpy for backtesting, websocket-client for live price streams. Any LLM will lean on these.

2. AI as the decision-maker (the riskier, mostly-hyped use) Using an LLM to actually pick entries/exits — "should I buy now" — is where you should be very careful. LLMs have no live market data by default, hallucinate confidently, can't reason about order flow, and have no inherent edge. There's a big gap between "LLM-in-the-loop as a signal filter" (plausible research direction) and "LLM runs my money" (a fast way to lose it). Historical fact: most retail bots of any kind fail because of execution risk and emotional overfitting, not because the model wasn't smart enough — market microstructure and fees eat naive strategies.

3. The honest caveats, whatever route you pick

• This is software engineering plus risk management, not a magic prompt. A backtest that looks great usually overfits to the past — real losses come from slippage, fees, and your bot being offline during the one move that mattered.
• I'm not a financial advisor and won't tell you to run any strategy with real money. Start with a paper-trading API key, not a live one.
• If you're asking about an "AI trading signal" product someone is selling, be skeptical — those are among the most common crypto scam categories.

Want a hand picking the right tools? I can pull up the current top spot DEXs and perp DEXs for where you'd route your bot's orders, or check a specific coin's current data to give your bot a real test case. Just tell me which direction you want to go.