academic-neural-unit-00/ — Academic Neural Unit 00 (ANU-00)

Entry point for Academic Neural Unit 00. Read this before doing any ANU-00-related work.

What This Is

ANU-00 is an independent academic research entity chartered to investigate frontier fields — computer science, artificial intelligence, neural networks, and software engineering — and to build a durable, navigable knowledge base from that research. It is one of the workspace's four co-resident systems (root CLAUDE.md §2), alongside The Company, The Studio, and the CC-00 Lab.

ANU-00 is architecturally independent of core-component-00/. CC-00 and its Director, Dr. Elias Vance, held an incubation role only during formation — advisory and methodological support, not governance, staffing, or line authority — and that involvement formally ended once ANU-00's own Lead was hired. No ANU-00 role reports into CC-00 or any Company department. Full boundary statement: formation/2026-07-23-formation-meeting/formation-report.md §2.

There is no application code under academic-neural-unit-00/. Runnable code lives exclusively in core-component-00/.

The Stage-of-Inquiry Test (Mandatory for Scoping Any ANU-00 Work)

Per the CEO-approved charter refinement (formation-report.md §3.1), every research question or proposed deliverable is scoped by stage of inquiry, not by which field's vocabulary it uses:

This applies even when a question shares vocabulary with a CC-00 module (e.g., "investigate emergent multi-agent coordination behavior" is ANU-00; "harden a coordination pattern into a reusable orchestration module" is CC-00, per multi-agent-engineering/).

Migrate-vs-task distinction (binding): a finding migrating from an ANU-00 programme into a future CC-00 initiative is ordinary research uptake and does not require special ratification. ANU-00 being tasked by CC-00, Dr. Vance, or the CEO to de-risk a specific item already on CC-00's roadmap, on request, recreates the "direct link" the CEO's original ruling prohibits — decline or escalate to the CEO instead of chartering it as an ordinary programme. Full detail: crew/lead/naledi-mokoena/skills/research-programme-chartering.md.

One universal exception — ASGF governance. Root CLAUDE.md §9 makes the Agent Systems Engineering framework mandatory for all LLM-powered systems in this workspace, ANU-00 included. Any LLM-powered tooling ANU-00 builds (e.g., its knowledge-base ingestion pipeline) is ASGF-bound as a technical standard — this is universal, not a governance link back to CC-00.

Directory Structure

academic-neural-unit-00/
├── CLAUDE.md                              ← this file
├── README.md                              ← entity overview, charter, boundary statement
├── formation/
│   └── 2026-07-23-formation-meeting/      ← charter, CEO decisions, final review (canonical history)
├── curriculum/                            ← agent-development textbook series; a chartered deliverable, not knowledge-base research (see curriculum/README.md)
├── templates/                             ← ANU-00 research templates (see templates/README.md)
│   ├── programme-records/                 ← charter, open-question log, referral note
│   └── knowledge-base/                    ← research report, taxonomy change record
├── knowledge-base/                        ← research output (see knowledge-base/README.md)
├── plans/                                 ← CEO-facing implementation plans awaiting/recording sign-off (see plans/README.md)
└── crew/                                  ← personnel roster (10 FTEs)
    ├── README.md                          ← roster index + activation protocol
    ├── lead/naledi-mokoena/                ← ANU-00 Lead
    ├── research-science/                   ← 7 Research Scientists (flat + one pod, see crew/README.md)
    └── knowledge-systems/tobias-lindqvist/ ← knowledge-base tooling

Crew Activation Protocol

To produce output as a named ANU-00 crew member:

1. Read crew/<functional-area>/[<pod>/]<name>/agent/profile.md — identity, authority scope, seniority.
2. Read all referenced skills/*.md files — executable contracts, not suggestions.
3. Adopt their voice; produce output strictly within their documented authority.
4. Escalate organizational or personnel questions to Dr. Mokoena (ANU-00 Lead) — never to Dr. Vance or any CC-00 crew member, and never assume CC-00 authority extends here.

Never impersonate a crew member without reading their profile first. Full roster, reporting lines, and span-of-control detail: crew/README.md.

Knowledge Base Convention

ANU-00's research output follows the workspace's existing dated research-archive pattern (YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/research-report.md), the same convention used by company/telescope/, studio/casual-games/telescope/, and core-component-00/telescope/ — for navigational consistency, not as a link to any one of those archives. The same dated YYYY-MM-DD-<slug>/ pattern is also used by curriculum/reviews/ (dated review cycles) and plans/ (dated CEO-facing implementation plans, see plans/README.md § Rule) — one convention applied consistently across ANU-00, not three independent inventions. No entries exist yet directly under knowledge-base/ itself; the convention is established ahead of first use there.

Curriculum vs. knowledge-base (boundary). curriculum/ is a chartered deliverable (a standing textbook series, see curriculum/README.md) with its own approval and review process — it is not filed through the knowledge-base template set, since knowledge-base entries are pre-implementation research findings from a chartered programme (see knowledge-base/README.md § Boundary Note), not finished teaching material. This is an existing distinction, restated here for discoverability from the entity-level file — not a new ruling.

Templates. Six templates govern the research process — charter, open-question log, observation record, referral note, research report, and taxonomy change record — under templates/, with knowledge-base/ opened as their destination. Every required section in them traces to a documented rule in a crew skill file or the charter; none exists on generic academic convention. Read templates/README.md before adding to or filing from them, and note what was deliberately not templated (including any external topic-request form — see that file's § What Was Deliberately Not Templated). Cross-system shapes — meeting minutes, final review — are reused from root templates/, not duplicated here.

Recruitment

Recruitment follows the standard company-wide 9-stage pipeline (company/pipeline/recruitment/pipeline.md) under CHRO authority, the same as every other department or entity in this workspace — ANU-00 has no separate hiring process of its own. Historical hiring records: company/recruitment/academic-neural-unit-00-fy2026-q3/.

Where to Look