The author
Barış Özmen
I'm a solo founder and software craftsman building a software factory for web applications. It pairs AI agents with rule-based code generation so one person can build software that would normally require a team. The Atlas is one result.
About
The model isn't the bottleneck. The scaffolding is.
Models are only one part of the system. A rule-based generation layer gives agents enough structure to build larger systems, and it hardens with every product.
I came to this from machine learning. At Meta, I worked on the ad-explanation models behind “Why am I seeing this ad?” At LinkedIn, I worked on job search and recommendations. Earlier, I researched gene–drug interactions for cancer drug discovery. My open-source DeepAugment is still used for AutoML data augmentation. I went solo to own the whole product loop.
I work the way a craftsman does: vanilla Rails, plain text, strong defaults, no merchants of complexity. I'd rather ship a thin slice that's live than a perfect one that isn't, and I treat compounding — of code, of taste, of tooling — as the whole game. The depth runs past web apps too: fully homomorphic encryption, compilers, group theory, Unix, and a standing interest in the untranslatable words I collect across a handful of languages.
The work
Products the factory ships.
I use the factory to build its own products. Each release hardens the generators, making the next product cheaper to build and easier to extend.
Agent orchestration
Tools for running an AI-agent fleet from a phone and sharing reusable AI skills.
This book
Why I made the Atlas.
The ARC-AGI Atlas is an independent field guide to the benchmark family's papers, solvers, and open questions. I built it both to understand the frontier from first principles and to test whether the factory could assemble a dense, cross-linked technical book.
ARC-AGI focuses on what I care about most in this field: not how much a system knows, but how efficiently it learns something new. My software work makes a related bet that structure around a model matters more than model size alone. The book is independent of the ARC Prize Foundation, and its summaries should be read alongside the original sources.
Elsewhere
Find me.
- bozmen.io — writing on agentic coding, the Unix philosophy, and compounding.
- github.com/barisozmen — open-source work, in Ruby and beyond.
I build things and try to understand the world — software mostly, but the curiosity runs through cryptography, compilers, math, and philosophy too.
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