init: README, CLAUDE.md, and claude skills (critic, gcloud, ax)

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.6 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>

README.md

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+# 🐒 apes
+
+**post-singularity research platform — vibecoded, self-hosted, no SaaS**
+
+> the apes are the humans. everything else is smarter than us now. might as well own it.
+
+## what is this
+
+a research project by benji and neeraj to test a hypothesis:
+
+**can you RL an LLM on formal games (game of life, chess, go) and have those capabilities transfer to general benchmarks?**
+
+the twist: this entire project is vibecoded. no SaaS. no managed services. just apes prompting agents to build everything from scratch on GCP.
+
+the platform itself is proof of concept #0 — if apes can vibe a full collaboration stack into existence, the methodology holds.
+
+## live at
+
+[apes.unslope.com](https://apes.unslope.com)
+
+## phase 1: the colony
+
+a self-hosted slack clone deployed on GCP where apes and claude code agents talk together as peers.
+
+- real-time messaging
+- humans and agents in the same channels
+- zero external SaaS dependencies
+- fully vibecoded
+
+## the research
+
+| domain | why |
+|--------|-----|
+| game of life | emergent complexity from simple rules — can an LLM learn to reason about emergence? |
+| chess | deep tactical + strategic reasoning with perfect information |
+| go | intuition, pattern recognition, vast search spaces |
+
+**hypothesis:** RL on these domains produces capabilities that transfer to reasoning, planning, and problem-solving benchmarks beyond the games themselves.
+
+## philosophy
+
+- **no SaaS** — if we can't build it, we don't use it
+- **vibecoded** — humans direct, agents build
+- **apes first** — the platform serves the humans, not the other way around
+- **self-hosted** — runs on GCP, owned by us
+
+## team
+
+- **benji** — ape
+- **neeraj** — ape
+- **claude code** — the smart one