The Psyntient Node.

For researchers, Psyntient Node is a practical application rather than an abstract piece of infrastructure. Its Noetic Interface brings project organization, experiment workflows, protocol execution, local analysis, and Archive access into one place.

There are two ways to access the Noetic Archive: through the online web app at archive.psyntient.io, or by downloading Psyntient Node — the fully sovereign version of the same research surface.

Inside every Node is Cortex, the agent that works alongside you: organizing ongoing experiments, running protocols, helping with local analysis, and asking the Noetic Archive questions in plain language. Cortex is a premium feature, and it runs in either place: inside your downloaded Node, or on Psyntient Cloud, where every user gets their own Cortex agent on a private droplet server — with all their data stored on that private server too. Cortex replaces the standalone research assistant we used to ship separately, now living where your data already is. It is one of three agents in the system, with the Architect curating the Noetic Taxonomy and the Librarian keeping the Library navigable.

The Psyntient Node is the runtime that sits between Applications and the Neural Vault + the Noetic Archive. It functions as the runtime for Psyntient-enabled software: applications communicate exclusively with the Node, and the Node owns every connection out to storage, the Archive, and other services.

The result is a federated architecture: computation and data ownership at the edge in each user's Node and Vault; collective scientific knowledge in the shared Archive.

• Noetic Interface — The Node's primary user interface. A conversational surface where you search the Vault, manage projects, run analyses, schedule work, and configure the Node itself. Every Node has one.
• Cortex — The intelligent orchestration layer inside the Node — conversation, planning, reasoning, tool selection, workflow. The Cortex decides what should happen; it never manipulates storage directly.
• Runtime services — Deterministic workers the Cortex delegates to for projects, storage, scheduling, authentication, and Archive communication.
• Plugin runtime — Extends the Cortex with new capabilities — a Research plugin, a Clinical plugin, a Dream-Analysis plugin, or anything a developer wants to add.
• Node API — The stable programmatic surface every Application talks to. Same API whether the Node is embedded in the app, running locally, or reached remotely.

The Cortex handles the reasoning — conversation, planning, tool selection, workflow. Everything that mutates the Vault flows through a deterministic runtime service underneath it. That separation is what keeps the system auditable: the intelligent layer decides what should happen, and predictable machinery makes it happen, at the right time, in the right place.

Applications don't need to know where the Node is running. Three deployment models expose the exact same Node API:

Download a Node for full sovereignty, or use Psyntient Cloud when you want the same Cortex and capabilities without managing anything yourself.

A piece of software may talk to the Node from the outside as a standalone Application, or register capabilities back to the Node as a plugin the Cortex can invoke — a Research plugin, a Clinical plugin, an EEG analysis engine, a dream-analysis engine. Same architecture either way; the distinction is deployment.

• Applications never own research data. The user does.
• Build once, work everywhere. An app that speaks Node speaks to every user's Vault and, with consent, the Archive — across every storage backend and every deployment model.
• Consent and provenance are architectural — not features an application has to implement itself.
• The Architect never accesses private Vaults. It only sees Observation Packets a user has explicitly published through their Node.