Posts with keyword: manifold

14 entries

Giving Picos a View

Wed Nov 11 09:27:00 2026

Release 1.9 of the pico engine lets a pico present its own user interface. A view is a shared function that returns XMLUI markup, and channel policy decides who gets to see it. This post describes the release, the sensor temperature viewer I built with it, and why a pico that can show itself to people is more complete than one that depends on someone else's front end.
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Way of the Pico

Mon Nov 9 09:03:00 2026

Programming models shape how builders think, and that's still true when the builder is a coding agent. Picos are a programming model far enough from the mainstream that most developers, human or not, start out writing them like a web service with a database. This post lays out the mindset behind picos: where they came from, what they borrow from actors and Smalltalk, and the habits of thought that make them easy to work with instead of strange.
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One Billion Thousand-Dollar Markets

Mon Nov 2 07:36:00 2026

Founders are told to look for a trillion-dollar market. When software gets cheap to build, the same trillion dollars can show up as a billion thousand-dollar markets: one small organization at a time, each with software that fits how it actually works. I'm building a CRM and invoicing system for IIW Foundation on picos to test that idea.
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Identity Enables Autonomy

Wed Oct 28 16:20:00 2026

Moving a pico from one engine to another looks like a migration feature, but the point is autonomy. Most people will never run their own servers, so freedom online depends on apps and data that can move between hosts, and identity is what lets them move without breaking. This post lays out the argument behind my IIW demo.
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Pico Engine 1.8 Is for Builders

Tue Oct 27 09:19:00 2026

Smalltalk taught a generation of programmers what it felt like to build by conversing with a live system, and Alan Kay hoped it would turn users into builders. Version 1.8 of the pico engine takes both ideas seriously: a better developer UI for people, an MCP surface for agents, and a schema underneath that makes both possible. This post describes the release and why the builders it serves don't all have to be developers.
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Moving Picos from Mesh to Mesh

Mon Oct 12 09:30:00 2026

Software that can’t leave the machine it was born on isn’t really yours. Version 1.7 of the pico engine lets a pico and its subtree move between engines while its relationships keep working, because other picos follow its DID rather than its address. This post describes what moves, why identity is what makes it possible, and what’s still ahead.
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Moving My Sensor Network onto Manifold

Thu Sep 17 10:08:00 2026

I moved my working LoRaWAN sensor network onto the new Manifold framework and pointed Home Assistant at it as the interface. The port went smoothly until the OAuth protection on the mesh blocked the inbound webhooks Helium uses to deliver readings. The fix was to let a mesh owner scope access channel by channel, and the pico engine now supports it.
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Why Not SPIFFE for Pico Identity?

Mon Aug 31 09:16:00 2026

A pico is arguably just a workload, so why give it a DID instead of using SPIFFE, the standard workload identifier? The answer comes down to whether the identity is meant to last. SPIFFE derives a workload's identity from what it is and where it runs, so it's re-minted per environment; a pico's identity is long-lived and travels with it.
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Pico-to-Pico Identity Arrives

Wed Aug 12 10:15:00 2026

Version 1.6 of the Pico Engine ships the pico-to-pico identity layer I promised but hadn't built. Every pico now carries two DIDs: a portable did:webvh that says who it is, and a private did:peer for each relationship it forms. This is the piece that lets a pico move between engines and lets two meshes create a relationship without a federation agreement set up in advance.
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A Map of the Manifold Environment

Wed Aug 5 08:35:00 2026

A reader asked for a map of the whole Manifold environment and the functional capabilities of each part. I have described this system across three posts, a piece at a time, but never in one picture.
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Using Home Assistant with Manifold

Mon Aug 3 07:50:00 2026

Manifold is evolving into a proper framework for building meshes of picos, and Home Assistant gives those meshes an interface. A new Home Assistant integration proves out three pieces at once: an OAuth workflow on the pico-engine that lets outside software into the mesh on the owner's terms, a mature interface rather than a custom one, and a pattern that lets specialized communities extend the platform.
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Identity for the Pico Engine

Tue Jul 14 11:52:00 2026

Version 1.5 of the Pico Engine finally brings identity into the engine itself: passkeys for humans, and OAuth for external apps and webhooks. Here's the shape of the design, why identity is really three problems and not one, and why I shipped the human and third-party layers before the pico-to-pico layer.
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Manifold API and Sensor Network: Two New Repos

Tue Jun 9 09:14:00 2026

Cleaning up manifold-api as a prerequisite for the spring conversational interface Capstone turned into a complete platform update: Pico Engine 1.0 compatibility, automated bootstrap, centralized notifications, and a Docker-based integration test harness. Once the platform was solid, the old temperature-network had an obvious new home inside Manifold's community framework, so I rewrote it too as an example of how Manifold can be a framework for pico networks.
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Building a Conversational Interface for Manifold with MCP and Picos

Wed Apr 22 11:14:00 2026

GUIs are dead—at least for most user experiences. This post describes a BYU capstone project where five seniors built a conversational interface for Manifold using MCP and picos. The result shows how natural language can replace a GUI entirely, letting users create, tag, and manage digital things through dialogue instead of learning a standard graphical user interface.
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