a repo is a city

every AI hackathon has the same gravity to it. a chatbot, a RAG pipeline, an agent that books your calendar. I wanted to build in the other direction, toward something you look at instead of something you talk to.

so, Atlas. you paste a public GitHub repo and get back a city. top-level folders become districts, each file a building sized by how much code it holds, and imports draw the roads between them. the load-bearing files light up as landmarks you can spot from across the map. you can pan, zoom, hover any building for details, and export the whole thing as one image.

underneath is a 4-agent pipeline that reads the repo and works out the whole layout server-side, before the browser ever paints it. the thing I kept coming back to is that a codebase already has a shape. files cluster, a few of them carry all the weight, most are quiet side streets. Atlas just puts that shape somewhere you can stand in front of it.

it was a 48-hour build at the IBM Bob hackathon, run by lablab.ai and IBM. 5,628 builders, 1,672 teams, 503 projects submitted, and Atlas came 2nd. I built it solo, with IBM's Bob as the only pair.

a few places wrote it up. in Korean: The Chosun Ilbo, The JoongAng, and The Hankyoreh; in English: The Korea Times and Aju Press.

the code is on github. paste in a repo you know and see if the city looks right.