Q01Will agents place live orders on their own?
No. The quant crew ships with HITL on every order, allocation change, and risk-limit edit. The agents research, backtest, score, and draft the deploy memo. A human PM presses the button on capital.
Q02Can the agents reason over our backtests and tick data?
Three ways. Static context attaches the strategy spec, factor definitions, and risk policy to specific personas on every run. The rag_retrieve tool lets QuantAnalyst and QuantSkeptic pull from backtest logs, past tearsheets, and prior post-mortems on demand. Cross-run memory keeps yesterday's walk-forward results in scope for today's regime test.
Q03Is this a QuantConnect or WorldQuant alternative?
No, it sits next to them. QuantConnect runs your backtest engine. WorldQuant hosts the factor competition. Melaya is the research-and-review layer that scores the signal, sizes the position, and stages the deploy memo. Your backtester stays your backtester.
Q04How do we keep the analysis from sounding like a generic AI tearsheet?
Every metric cites its sample size and time window. QuantAnalyst reports Sharpe with its standard error, QuantSkeptic reports the Deflated Sharpe with the trials count, and ReportWriter refuses to soften a REJECTED verdict. Reviewers can require a citation on every claim as a HITL pre-check.
Q05Which models can we run this crew on?
Any. Claude on QuantSkeptic where adversarial reasoning earns the cost, GPT on the ReportWriter, and a local Ollama on the QuantAnalyst when the strategy spec and tick data must stay inside your VPC. Each agent picks its own.
Q06How fast can a quant team get the first review pipeline running?
With your backtest output sitting in S3 or a SQL warehouse, the signal-quality-to-deploy-memo workflow is a 4-node canvas: ingest results, run QuantAnalyst plus QuantSkeptic, gate on the verdict, draft the memo. Most desks ship it in a working session and review the first strategy the same day.
Q07How does this handle regime change and walk-forward validation?
QuantSkeptic refuses any strategy without walk-forward validation and at least one out-of-sample regime. The CRO persona runs the 2008, 2020, and 2022 stress books on the proposed allocation. If either fails, ReportWriter cannot output a DEPLOY action by design.
Q08Can I audit exactly what the agent did and why?
Every run logs every step, every tool call, every model invocation, and every approval decision. Replay any run at any time. The audit log is the risk log, and it ships with the deploy memo into your compliance archive.
Q09Can we restrict which agents can write to our broker or risk system?
Yes. Tool scoping is per-agent. The QuantSkeptic and QuantAnalyst run read-only against backtest stores. Only the PortfolioManager can stage an allocation change, and that change is HITL-gated by default. The CRO is the only persona allowed to edit circuit-breaker thresholds.
Q10Why not just write the strategy review as a Python script?
A script executes the checks you thought to write, in a fixed order, and rots as the desk changes. Melaya, the visual AI agent builder, runs a six-persona crew where the Quant Skeptic can refuse a verdict, demand walk-forward evidence, and log a typed failure reason. Every step lands in full run traces, and destructive database calls stay HITL-gated.
Q11Can we reuse one review pipeline across every strategy the desk produces?
Yes. Save any run as a template and every candidate passes through the same six workflows: signal quality, execution cost decomposition, Kelly sizing, stress testing, the skeptic pass, and the memo. The data_utils bundle hashes each result file, so the audit log proves the tearsheet under review matches the one the PM signed.
Q12How do we control what a full strategy review costs to run?
Melaya routes each step to a different model across 23 providers, so the Quant Analyst's heavy statistics can run on a frontier model while the Report Writer's memo formatting runs on a cheap one. Cost per accepted result is tracked per run, and full run traces show exactly which step spent what.
Q13Can Melaya watch our portfolio in a broker app that has no API?
Yes, for monitoring only. Melaya's Device Control operates a real Android phone: the agent opens the allowed broker app, reads the screen, and reports positions back into the workflow, no API required. Device Control cannot place orders, trading is paused across the platform, and every write pauses for on-device approval.
Q14Can the crew analyze our backtests without the data leaving our infrastructure?
Yes. Melaya runs in the cloud or on your local runner, and sensitive steps can stay on the runner. The database bundle reads backtest output and tick captures from your warehouse in place, destructive SQL calls are HITL-gated and off by default, and the finance bundle is read-only by design with no broker writes possible.