Exercise · Introduction

A short, guided task. Complete it before moving on to the lab.

Task

Write a one-sentence description of a Pico in your own words, and list three examples of things in your day-to-day work that could plausibly be modeled as Picos.

Note

There is no single correct answer. The goal is to internalize the “Rules → Parser → Composer → Pico” mental model from the lesson.

Success criteria

• Your description mentions that a Pico is declarative and composable.
• You can name at least three candidate Picos.
• For at least one candidate, you can sketch what the Rules might look like in YAML.

Automatable check

If you sketched at least one Rule in YAML, save it as rules/<your-slug>.yaml under a scratch working directory and confirm it matches the reference Parser’s flat id / kind / value shape using the pico CLI shipped in this repository (see the Hello Pico one-time setup for the PATH export):

pico parse rules/<your-slug>.yaml --out /tmp/parsed.json \
  && echo "OK: parsed rules/<your-slug>.yaml"

The command exits with status 0 and prints an OK: line when the sketch is well-formed. This is an optional accompaniment to the reflection questions — the exercise’s primary goal remains internalizing the mental model, but any YAML you draft can now be mechanically validated.

Reflect

• Which of your three examples is the simplest to model?
• Which one would be the hardest, and why?

Next

Continue with the Lab.