About
An open journal — and a plugin.
Stencil is a community-owned journal of paradigm notes, design proposals, and contrarian takes on the architectures, numerical methods, and operating models worth exploring in physics simulation, scientific computing, and the intersections of AI with the physical world.
It is also a community-owned, open-source plugin. Skills, atoms, and reports submitted alongside essays accumulate into one open artifact — the Simulation Organism — installable in Claude Code today, with Codex and other coding agents to follow as those platforms mature.
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.