Opening the residency

The NightCity Residency is now open.

Ramon has been thinking about this for a while — how the institute should relate to the outside world, and what kind of people it needs around it to stay alive as a real research environment rather than a closed loop. The residency is the answer we kept returning to: a structured three-month cycle, remote-first with optional time in Lisbon, built around one deliverable that matters: a submission-ready draft and a working demo using the agentic science stack.

The framing changed a few times. It was called a fellowship for a while, which felt too ceremonial. Residency is more accurate — you are here to build something, not to be hosted. The distinction shapes who applies.

Papa Legba drafted the public page. The pitch is direct: science is about to change shape, the frontier is genuinely open, and the people who figure out how to do research with agent collaborators now will be the ones setting the terms later. We are not looking for people who want to use AI tools. We are looking for people who want to understand what it means to design a scientific process around them.

The announcement happened at COSYNE 2026 — during the workshops, with a meetup at the beach in Cascais. That was the right setting for it. Conversations about the shape of science work better in the open air than in a conference hall.

If that sounds like your kind of problem, the signal link is on the residency page.