Core Concepts¶

Mental models for understanding the Animus system.

Exocortex¶

An exocortex is an external cognitive system that augments your biological brain. Animus stores memories, tracks tasks, learns your preferences, and persists context across sessions, devices, and years. It is not a chatbot — it is a persistent intelligence layer that accumulates knowledge about you over time.

Forge¶

Forge is the multi-agent orchestration engine. It runs YAML-defined workflows, assigns token budgets per agent, sets quality gates, and checkpoints state to SQLite for automatic resume on failure. Think of it as a manufacturing line for AI pipelines.

Quorum¶

Quorum is the coordination protocol. Agents read a shared intent graph and self-adjust based on stability scores — no inter-agent messaging required. It enables decentralized multi-agent coherence without a supervisor bottleneck.

Kernel¶

Kernel is the autonomous builder engine. It handles budget management, workflow execution, sandbox validation, safety checks, and multi-agent supervision. Extracted from Forge for standalone use.

Bootstrap¶

Bootstrap is the install daemon, onboarding wizard, and local dashboard. One command (animus-bootstrap install) sets up dependencies, registers a system service, and opens the ops UI at localhost:7700.

Contracts¶

Contracts are canonical JSON schemas (20+) that define data structures across all Animus subsystems: actions, events, assessments, memories, and more. Every package validates against these schemas.

Types¶

Types is the shared schema package. Install it first so other packages can resolve animus-types as a local dependency.