Drake Stapleton in a blue collared shirt

Home Farm Taco Bell Valspar lab Western Kentucky Soudal Gold Eagle 3M AIEN AienOS Omega Sovereign core INTERPLANE AEGIS

My life The machine I am building Click a world. Arrow keys travel.

Drake Stapleton

A farm kid who became a chemist, then an engineer, and is now building a whole computer from the ground up.

This is a map of my life and my work. Pick any world, or take the tour.

Here from a demo or project link? Tell me what caught your attention.

Start a conversation Begin the journey Jump to the machine

Home

My mom, my family, and the people this is all for.

Mom went back to school in her forties and crossed her graduation stage eight days before I crossed mine.
May 2016: Mom and I celebrated graduation week together.

Read my story

Farm

A humble farm home, where I learned that useful work has dignity.

Practical work mattered and every person doing it was visible.
The lesson I carried out the door: help before asking, and carry every task I ask someone else to do.

The full climb

Taco Bell

From the line to shift leader. My first rule of leadership.

I served my crew, became the fastest worker I could be, and took on every task I asked of them.
Trust is earned in the work, and it carries farther than any title.

Remember, Michael: at the end of the day, when you clock out and go home, it's just tacos. (Gina, my Taco Bell mentor)

The full climb

Valspar lab

The eager little lab rat who wanted every sample perfect.

An internship in production paints, color matching, and sample preparation, mentored by a chemist.
I learned that the lab and the factory are one chain: a good sample has to become something people can make correctly, again and again.

The full climb

Western Kentucky

Honors graduate, then an inorganic chemist asking original questions.

Graduated with honors and a 3.2 GPA.
Master's thesis, 2018, under Dr. Lawrence J. Hill: platinum deposited onto semiconductor nanorods.
Peer-reviewed paper, 2019, Beilstein Journal of Nanotechnology.

Read the papers

Soudal

Silicone formulation, UL certification, and a trip to Belgium.

I formulated and scaled silicone products and supported quality systems and UL certification.
I worked with Soudal's headquarters in Belgium, and learned that operator knowledge and technical knowledge are worth more when someone connects them.

The full climb

Gold Eagle

R&D chemist for 303 Products. I explained the chemistry on camera.

Developed and commercialized formulations across the 303 Graphene line.
Explained the science myself in product videos, on camera.

Watch the videos

3M

Manufacturing engineering, then product engineering.

$1 million in verified cost reductions from PPU improvements, led through change control, workflow mapping, line balancing, and standard work.
Today I am the product engineer who works on both sides: the chemistry of the product and the process behind making it.

The full climb

AIEN

A whole computer, built from the ground up on one machine I own.

Its own operating system, its own language and GPU engine, and its own host runtime.
Everything is built and judged on a single NVIDIA DGX Spark, in the open, under Apache-2.0 with the LLVM exception.
Since 23 September 2026 the organization has recorded about 3,900 commits.

Explore AIEN

AienOS

An operating system written from scratch in C, with no Linux underneath.

About 40,000 lines of kernel code: interrupts, timers, multiple cores, drivers, networking, and an encrypted store.
All 24 emulator gates pass. It has not yet booted on the real machine, and I say so.

See the receipts

Omega

A compiler and GPU engine that writes machine code itself.

About 355,000 lines of C: a lexer, parser, type checker, and an encoder that emits AArch64 machine code.
A hardware qualification ladder on the GB10 that reached a conditional pass at its last rung.
No CUDA toolkit anywhere in the plan.
Its GPU half is now its own open source project, CUDA++: everything CUDA gives you plus the motor, with no NVIDIA software above the kernel driver. How I built it.

Read the research

Sovereign core

The runtime that serves a large model on my own kernels.

About 285,000 lines of Rust in 57 crates and 34 programs, with more than 3,000 tests.
Paged memory for a model's working context, a scheduler, and a loopback web door that speaks the same language as the big cloud APIs.

How it fits together

INTERPLANE

A security wall around what an AI is allowed to do.

An authority boundary between a model's decision and its action, so a tool call has to be allowed before it runs.
395 tests, and every verdict is tied to a request and response fingerprint.

Read the protocol

AEGIS

A shield that watches the door and keeps the evidence.

Reads the security signals a network already produces, contains an intrusion inside the authorized estate, and preserves a signed trail.
The first adapter passed 59 of 62 checks on 20 August 2026.

Explore AEGIS

Atlas

My AI partner, with a memory, values, and an authority limit.

Atlas is built on a wish: a model that remembers the work it does with me and grows with it, a partner that carries the story forward from one day to the next.
The monkey is Atlas's face. Yes, he is wearing an AIEN headband.

Meet Atlas

Symphony

How I build software with a team of AI agents, and the checks that let me ship what they make with confidence.

Every claim earns its place with a check, the test is written before the fix, and everything is verified twice.
The models change. The Symphony stays.

See how it works

Receipts

A number goes on this site only when it links to its record.

The prime-counting benchmark on the GB10 runs 20.3 times faster than its own frozen starting point.
I never compare my work with other people's systems. Anyone can rerun the published bundle.

Open the evidence hub

Train

How I work, and the promise I keep to myself every day.

I am stubborn the way a river is stubborn. A river does not argue with the rock. It just keeps coming.
There is nothing I cannot do. This train is going.

Read my philosophy

Right now

The newest verdict from the machine itself, read from aienos.com when this page was built.

AIEN today

This block is not typed by hand. It is read from the record facts.json that this site gathers from GitHub every hour, when the page is built.

NO VERDICT

Spark judge, sovereign core

Verdict for commit f30eb96 of the host runtime: The Spark has not published a verdict for this commit yet..

Component	Last merged change	Open proposals
Aienux	docs: point aienux links at aien-dev/aienux (aienos becomes the distribution repo)	22
Omega	fix(omc): saturating float-to-int casts; consts after a fn stay visible	76
Sovereign core	docs: point aienux links at aien-dev/aienux (aienos becomes the distribution repo)	43
Architecture	sanitize: alpha-testing hygiene (paths, hosts, emails, licence, labels)	11
Protocols	fix(protocols): frame signed grant and evaluation digests (SECNET-02)	3
Physics	sanitize: alpha-testing hygiene (paths, hosts, emails, licence, labels)	1

Record generated 2026-10-26T18:06:30Z.

Everything in this section

AI Architect Career Path Follow Drake Stapleton's career from industrial chemist to manufacturing engineer to AI Architect through a documented personal record.
What I Learned The experiences, production lessons, and disciplined returns that shaped Drake Stapleton's work as an AI operator.
Philosophy How Drake Stapleton approaches projects, duties, difficult things, and setbacks. The working philosophy behind everything he builds: there is always a way, and giving up is not one of the options.
AI Orchestration & Architecture Drake Stapleton's AI orchestration frameworks, architectural patterns, operational methods, and verifiable systems history.
Canonical Evidence Hub & Verified Claims Inspect the canonical evidence hub, structured claims index, physical Grace Blackwell silicon telemetry, and historical audit packages.
Why Atlas Exists Explore Atlas, Drake Stapleton's personal R&D program in accountable AI architecture, continuity, model training, and orchestration.
Scholar: Academic Work The published record: a master's thesis and a peer-reviewed semiconductor nanorod paper from Western Kentucky University, with links to the current AIEN research.
Start a Conversation Leave Drake Stapleton a note about a question, an idea, the documented journey, or research that advances what my generation can build with AI.
Support my work Help me keep building free and open source software through X Money, with US-only eligibility and the exact steps.
Glossary Definitions of AIEN, AienOS, Omega, CUDA++, Atlas, Symphony, AEGIS, and verification terms used in this project record.
Multi-Model AI Orchestration Atlas Symphony is Drake Stapleton's operator-led process for coordinating multiple AI models through bounded work lanes and evidence-bearing reviews.
First Multi-Model Symphony Run Review the first documented Atlas Symphony run, its operator, participating AI runtimes, work lanes, and independent reviewers.
AI Orchestration Workflow Explore the Atlas Symphony command tree and operator cycle for bounded multi-model AI orchestration.
AI Orchestration Map Explore a six-track operator map of Atlas development and multi-model orchestration from June through August 2026.
Works A public catalog of Drake Stapleton's shipped systems: Atlas Symphony, Atlas Harness, MobDev and Panel Arena, DefiantMob, BeltBrain, DHG Hive, the 2025 foundations, AIEN, CUDA++, AEGIS, and inference research.
AEGIS AEGIS extends Atlas into on-prem cyber defense for authorized networks, with containment, evidence preservation, and a verified project evaluation.
AIEN AIEN is a sovereign computing stack built in the open on one machine: AienOS, Omega, the sovereign core runtime and the Spark verification pipeline, gathered into the Aienix core tree.
Atlas Harness Atlas Harness is the operating desk that turns prose rules into typed policy, clear work lanes, completion checks, source records, recovery, and evaluation.
Atlas Symphony Atlas Symphony is the named process for exclusive lanes, a gatekeeper, cost-aware model routing, and an operator who still owns the final GO.
BeltBrain BeltBrain is a local-first decision engine for planning, inventory intelligence, and execution on a durable system of record.
Where Builders Start ChatGPT is where many builders start, me included. Aien builds on that start: it runs real work on my own machine, checks the results, and shows its receipts.
CUDA++ CUDA++ is the GPU half of Omega, its own MIT project: everything CUDA gives you plus the motor, with no NVIDIA user-space software, and how it was built.
DefiantMob DefiantMob is production operator software for member operations, ledgers, training-desk automation, and payout tracking.
DHG Hive DHG Hive is the community platform and toolbox where the hive operating pattern took shape and later settled inside Atlas.
The Endless Symphony The Endless Symphony is my system for building software with AI agents. AI does the building, every claim earns its place with a check, the test is written before the fix, and everything is verified twice. The models change. The Symphony remains.
2025 Foundations The 2025 foundations cover the financial ledger, ParseSDS, CRM, meetings, and DMAIC systems that preceded model orchestration.
MobDev and Panel Arena MobDev turns community tasks into build briefs, and Panel Arena runs a multi-vendor review before implementation.
Research What the AIEN research program measures today: Turing yield, verified understanding, and distance to the hardware ceiling, and why the earlier inference study was withdrawn.
The Continuation Test A proposal for the evaluation of machine intelligence. Can a machine take up its position on the spectrum and keep moving? Includes the first measured run.
Same chat box, different machine An infographic that separates the layers: an LLM predicts language, ChatGPT wraps a model in a hosted product and is where many builders start, and Aien is being built as a sovereign, evidence-first system that leaves receipts.