Paradigm notes and the artifacts behind them.

Stencil is free. It has no paywall, no editorial board, no submission queue, no impact-factor anxiety, and no advertisement. It will stay that way.

The institutions that mediate scientific discourse have done good work in their day. They have also drifted somewhere that no longer serves the writer or the reader. Commercial publishers extract billions in subscription fees from publicly funded science. "Open access" routes charge authors thousands of dollars per paper for the privilege of being read. Editorial boards decide which ideas are worth circulating; the safe, the consensus-friendly, and the easy-to-cite win, and contrarian work is filtered out before it reaches the people who would build on it.

We don't think this calls for overthrowing anything. We think it calls for walking around it — together. Stencil is what happens when essays, reusable skills, and the experiments behind them all live in the open, under their authors' names, building on each other in public.

In a free market of ideas, the right correction for a bad essay is a better essay. The right response to a flawed paradigm is an alternative paradigm — published openly, named openly, and tested in the open. No gatekeeper required.

Stencil is also a plugin. Every essay can carry the skills, atoms, and reports its author chose to share — and those artifacts accumulate into one community-owned Simulation Organism that any Claude Code user can install.

The middleman has had a long run. Time for the rest of us to write — and build.