1. Introduction

What is a Pico, and why build one?

Learning objectives

By the end of this lesson you will be able to:

  • Describe what a Pico is in one sentence.
  • Name the three main components (Rules, Parser, Composer) and their role.
  • Identify where a Pico sits in the Open Engineering ecosystem.

Prerequisites

  • A working shell and text editor.
  • Comfort reading YAML.
  • No prior Pico experience is required.

What is a Pico?

A Pico is the smallest useful Open Engineering artifact: a declarative, composable unit described by Rules and produced by a Parser and a Composer. See the Glossary for full definitions of each term.

Tip

If you can describe a thing with a handful of Rules and produce it from those Rules, you can model it as a Pico.

The Rules → Parser → Composer pipeline

Rules  ─────▶  Parser  ─────▶  Composer  ─────▶  Pico
(YAML)         (reads Rules)   (produces output)  (hello-world-pico)

Part 2 walks through this pipeline in detail. This lesson focuses on vocabulary and the mental model.

Lesson pages

Every lesson in this course has the same page layout. Use it as the reference when authoring lessons in other courses.

  • Exercise — a short, guided task you complete inline.
  • Lab — a longer, hands-on activity, often linking to a reusable lab under labs/.
  • Summary — the key takeaways of the lesson.
  • Quiz — a short knowledge check.

Next

Continue with the Exercise.