About
Publishing, re-grounded.
Stencil is a community-owned open journal of physics simulation — and a community-owned, open-source companion plugin for the coding agents now doing most of the building. Claude Code today, Codex and other coding agents to follow.
The premise: a publication is worthwhile to the extent it raises the capability of the models and coding agents that act on it. Stencil exists to make that explicit. Every essay carries the skills, atoms, and verifiable reports its author chose to share — and those artifacts accumulate into one versioned, attributed Simulation Organism.
Beyond the venue, Stencil is a position: scientific publishing has to be re-grounded around what raises agent capability, and Stencil is doing its part in shifting publishing practice to match the work of our time.
How it works
Authors publish under their own names. Source files, diagrams, and data are open by default. Citations resolve to permanent DOIs minted on Zenodo. Skills live in the plugin repository as plain markdown; the website renders them and links contributors back to the source.
License
Essays and skill markdown are CC-BY-4.0. Plugin source code is MIT. Authors retain copyright; the license is the grant.
Origin
Stencil grew out of Pouria Mistani's personal journal — also called Stencil — and was opened up as a community venue in May 2026. It is a public-domain, open-source effort: no legal entity, no editorial board, no corporate sponsor. The personal Stencil at pouriamistani.com/blog continues alongside this one.
The name
In numerical methods, a stencil is the small, deliberate pattern of grid points a solver uses to approximate a derivative — local, geometric, with the whole continuum hanging from a handful of decisions. Every essay here is an attempt at one.