Part 1 — Inside a Sandcastle

Part 1 establishes what a Sandcastle is and what it isn’t, and walks through the five construction-layer concerns that make it suitable for safely producing Open Engineering artifacts:

  1. Isolated workspaces — the sandbox boundary.
  2. Repo/branch flow — how work moves in and out durably.
  3. Tools and permissions — what the engineering agent can and cannot do.
  4. Agent iteration — the inner loop the agent runs inside the Sandcastle.
  5. Artifact boundaries — what survives when the Sandcastle is torn down.

The single Part 1 lesson develops the mental model the rest of the course will build on. The lesson is instruction-first, followed by a paper exercise and then a runnable Sandcastle lab: Lesson 1’s Lab page now links to the reusable Hello World Pico Sandcastle lab, which executes the full Sandcastle path end-to-end.

Lessons

Lessons in Part 1 use the same lesson layout as the Pico Introduction lesson and the Crossplane Part 1 lesson.

  • 1. Inside a Sandcastle — introduces the Sandcastle construction layer, its five concerns, and how it sits between the Crossplane composition layer and the Pico runtime layer.

Where the runnable lab lives

The first runnable Sandcastle lab is published as a reusable lab under the repository-root labs/ directory at labs/hello-world-pico-sandcastle/ so it can be reused from other courses. Lesson 1’s Lab page links to it directly and keeps the earlier paper walkthrough as an optional pre-run rehearsal of the same five construction-layer concerns.