Phil Windley's Technometria

Summary: Some agent actions are too consequential to leave to policy alone.

Summary: I moved my working LoRaWAN sensor network onto the new Manifold framework and pointed Home Assistant at it as the interface.

Summary: A remodel left me with lights over two fireplace benches wired to separate switches, so turning them on meant a walk to both ends of the room.

Summary: My twenty-five-year-old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, so I used Claude to write one in a morning.

Summary: My new book, Authorization in Action, is out from Manning.

Summary: A pico is arguably just a workload, so why give it a DID instead of using SPIFFE, the standard workload identifier?

Summary: Version 1.6 of the Pico Engine ships the pico-to-pico identity layer I promised but hadn't built.

Summary: Eve Maler argues that identity's apparent diseconomies of scale are really about gnarliness, not size.

Summary: A reader asked for a map of the whole Manifold environment and the functional capabilities of each part.

Summary: Manifold is evolving into a proper framework for building meshes of picos, and Home Assistant gives those meshes an interface.

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.

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.

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…