Recently looking at on-chain transactions, the more I look, the more I feel that "sandwich/arbitrage" is, you think you've scored a bargain, but often you're just paying others' fees + slippage taxes. To put it simply, you execute a swap, and someone is watching your tolerance level, manipulating the price back and forth; your profit isn't falling from the sky, it's deducted from your transaction.

Now there are a bunch of AI Agents/auto-trading tools coming out, the narrative sounds impressive, but I'm more concerned about how they sign, how much permission they have, whether retries on failure will cause chaos, and not ending up with "auto" turning into "auto money transfer." My current approach is very simple: small tests, limit slippage, use limit orders when possible, anyway I don't compete with MEV for speed—if I do, it's probably just fuel.