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Summary 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.

Summary Eve Maler argues that identity's apparent diseconomies of scale are really about gnarliness, not size. That gnarliness has a shape I drew for chapter 19 of my forthcoming book: the gap between a growing decision surface and the infrastructure meant to govern it. That gap is authorization pressure, and it explains why identity gets harder even when a team does everything right. Eve Maler recently unpacked a statistic that is easy to misread.

Summary 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. Emil Sotirov wrote after my last few posts with a good request: Would you, please, do a map/diagram of the whole environment you're describing, giving an idea about the functional capabilities? That's a fair thing to ask.

Summary 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.

Summary 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. Today I'm releasing version 1.5 of the Pico Engine.

Summary In agentic systems, the principal, action, and resource are often unknown until the moment an agent acts, and the context that governs the decision arrives as a flood of signals from many sources. This post looks at how that context takes shape, where each signal is actually consumed, and why a non-directed world of agents still needs decisions that humans can inspect and predict. This post is part of a series on using dynamic authorization to control and coordinate AI agents.

Summary 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.

Summary Picos already have persistent identity, owned state, and an event-driven architecture—exactly the properties that make a good substrate for AI agents. The integration path starts with a simple webhook and leads somewhere much more interesting: a world where AI works for you, reasoning over data that is stored in your picos rather than on someone else’s platform.

Summary IIW XLII brought 287 people to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View for three days of sessions on identity, agents, and the legal and technical foundations of first person digital life. The agenda reflected a community grappling with real deployment challenges: SEDI and duty of loyalty, agentic identity, MyTerms, post-quantum cryptography, and the EUDI wallet. AIW2 followed on Friday, continuing the agentic internet conversation.

Summary Alan Mayo frames the digital identity design choice as enhance, duplicate, or replace, and places Utah's SEDI in the "replace" bucket alongside purist decentralized identity. That badly misreads the architecture and the policy goal. SEDI is not trying to eliminate institutional trust; it is state-endorsed, rights-first digital identity reuse that keeps institutional authority where it belongs while moving presentation and consent closer to the individual.