Pico Engine

The Pico Engine is an open-source Node.js runtime for Persistent Compute Objects (picos)—event-driven software actors that hold state, run rules, and communicate by raising and receiving events. Developers program picos in KRL (Kinetic Rule Language) and organize them into parent/child trees with channels, subscriptions, and policy-controlled queries and events. The engine includes a developer UI for exploring picos, installing rulesets, managing channels, and forming subscriptions, plus built-in passkey authentication so each operator gets their own mesh (root pico and descendants).

Picos are designed for people-centric, distributed systems: smart homes, personal agents, IoT meshes, and app frameworks like Manifold that sit on top of the engine. The engine handles persistence, ruleset execution, channel policy, and—since 1.6—portable did:webvh identity and Layer 2 subscriptions so picos on the same machine or on different engines can discover each other and exchange queries and events securely. You install it with npm, run pico-engine, and build behavior by installing or writing KRL rulesets rather than wiring low-level infrastructure yourself.