I designed a 0.9B Mamba-2 / GLA hybrid LLM — the AI agents wrote the code. An honest build log.

Let me be clear about my role up front, because it matters: I didn't hand-write the code for this. I designed the system and directed it — the architecture, the decisions, the why, and the discipline of debugging it. The actual implementation was written by AI coding agents (Claude and Codex). I was the architect and the lead; they were the hands.

That collaboration is half the reason I'm writing this. The other half is that it's still a work in progress, and I'd rather show the honest version.

What it is

Helix v2 / Auralis — a ~0.9B-parameter hybrid language model, built from the tokenizer up (not a fine-tune, not an API wrapper):

28 layers, heterogeneous: 6× Mamba-2 (state-space) → 16× GLA (Gated Linear Attention) → 6× Sparse-Attention