THE FRONTIER IS THE METHOD: A $0 RECIPE FOR ARC-AGI-2 VIA LLM-ASSIST, NEAR-MISS LIBRARY, AND HINT-INJECTED REPAIR

We document a zero-marginal-cost approach to ARC-AGI-2 that reaches 24.2% on the public evaluation set (29 of 120 tasks solved at >=0.95 pixel accuracy: 15 exact, 14 in the 0.95 - 0.999 frontier band) - 100.7% of the current open SOTA (NVARC, 24%) - using handcrafted grid primitives, one-shot LLM program synthesis with execution verification, a persistent near-miss library, and hint-injected repair. The load-bearing claim: under a hard $0 budget, the binding constraint is not model intelligence but candidate diversity and failure memory. We measured 37 prototype iterations; every number in this writeup regenerates from receipts on disk. The companion notebook reproduces Prototypes 07/09 and the library pipeline.