We introduce Heptapod, an image autoregressive model that adheres to the foundational principles of language modeling. Heptapod employs \textbf{causal attention}, \textbf{eliminates reliance on CFG}, and \textbf{eschews the trend of semantic tokenizers}. Our key innovation is \textit{next 2D distribution prediction}: a causal Transformer with reconstruction-focused visual tokenizer, learns to predict the distribution over the entire 2D spatial grid of images at each timestep. This learning objective unifies the se…