Pica – Rust-based agentic AI infrastructure (open-source)
Hi HN, Founder here. We built Pica, an open-source platform in Rust to enable agentic AI with three main focus areas: - Access to APIs and tools: Universal SDKs that let AI agents use thousands of external actions without blowing up your context window. - Visibility and traceability: Full audit logs of every decision/action to ensure transparency and accountability. - Alignment with human intentions: Seamless guardrails for autonomous tasks; e.g., restricting certain email actions to human approval. Why this matters: As autonomy in AI grows, we need robust solutions for trust and…
In plain words
Pica is an open-source Rust platform for building agentic AI systems. It provides universal SDKs for AI agents to access external APIs and tools without consuming excessive context, maintains complete audit logs of all decisions and actions, and includes guardrails to require human approval for sensitive tasks. The platform is designed for developers building autonomous AI systems that need transparency, accountability, and alignment with human oversight.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, Founder here. We built Pica, an open-source platform in Rust to enable agentic AI with three main focus areas: - Access to APIs and tools: Universal SDKs that let AI agents use thousands of external actions without blowing up your context window. - Visibility and traceability: Full audit logs of every decision/action to ensure transparency and accountability. - Alignment with human intentions: Seamless guardrails for autonomous tasks; e.g., restricting certain email actions to human approval. Why this matters: As autonomy in AI grows, we need robust solutions for trust and oversight. Pica aims to empower developers with the building blocks for safe and capable agentic systems. We’d love your feedback—check it out: https://hellopica.com/ If you find our project useful, consider giving us a on GitHub! It means the world to us and helps others discover our work. https://github.com/picahq/pica
Does the same job
all alternatives →
- IPI put an AI agent on a $7/month VPS with IRC as its transport layerMar 2026 · georgelarson.me · ▲340
The stack: two agents on separate boxes. The public one (nullclaw) is a 678 KB Zig binary using ~1 MB RAM, connected to an Ergo IRC server. Visitors talk to it via a gamja web client embedded in my site. The private one (ironclaw) handles email and scheduling, reachable only over Tailscale via Google's A2A protocol. Tiered inference: Haiku 4.5 for conversation (sub-second, cheap), Sonnet 4.6 for tool use (only when needed). Hard cap at $2/day. A2A passthrough: the private-side agent borrows the gateway's own inference pipeline, so there's one API key and one billing relationship…
- OSOpen-source playground to red-team AI agents with exploits publishedMar 2026 · github.com · ▲30
We build runtime security for AI agents. The playground started as an internal tool that we used to test our own guardrails. But we kept finding the same types of vulnerabilities because we think about attacks a certain way. At some point you need people who don't think like you. So we open-sourced it. Each challenge is a live agent with real tools and a published system prompt. Whenever a challenge is over, the full winning conversation transcript and guardrail logs get documented publicly. Building the general-purpose agent itself was probably the most fun part. Getting it to reliably use…
- COClawe – open-source Trello for agent teamsFeb 2026 · github.com · ▲62
We recently started to use agents to update some documentation across our codebase on a weekly basis, and everything quickly turned into cron jobs, logs, and terminal output. it worked, but was hard to tell what agents were doing, why something failed, or whether a workflow was actually progressing. We thought it would be more interesting to treat agents as long-lived workers with state and responsibilities and explicit handoffs. Something you can actually see and reason about, instead of just tailing logs. So we built Clawe, a small coordination layer on top of OpenClaw that lets agent…
More ai this month
the category →
I trained a 125M-parameter transformer to autocomplete piano performances in real time (~108 notes/sec on an iPhone 15). The idea is basically GitHub Copilot or Tabnine, except instead of prompting it with code, you prompt it by playing a few notes on a MIDI piano. The model then continues what you played, entirely on-device. The app is free if anyone wants to try it. Happy to answer questions about the model, training, Core ML, or the many things that didn't work.
AI · 17d ago · simedw.com
Astute▲585Automate your B2B brand going viral, with new media creators
AI · 18d ago · company-app.joinastute.com
Hey HN, Henry from Cactus here! We previously released Cactus Needle, a 14MB agentic LLM for tool call, device use, and structured extraction for phones, wearables, smart homes, small robots and microcontrollers. We got really great feedback here, and have now incorporated the suggestions to release Needle 2. The whole model is a single 14MB binary that runs a full session in 28MB of RAM; 45m parameters at 2bit compression. Needle hits 500 tokens/sec decode speed on a Raspberry Pi 5, sits between 400-1,500 tokens/sec on VR devices like Meta Quest 3S and Apple Vision Pro, and ranges…
AI · 27d ago · cactuscompute.com
Launched alongside, January 2025
the whole month →- IM
Hello! I'm Byran. I spent the past ~6 months engineering a laptop from scratch. It's fully open-source on GH at: https://github.com/Hello9999901/laptop
Dev tools · 2025 · byran.ee
- TITetris in a PDF▲1,289
I realized that the PDF engines of modern desktop browsers (PDFium and PDF.js) support JavaScript with enough I/O primitives to make a basic game like Tetris. It was a bit tricky to find a union of features that work in both engines, but in the end it turns out that showing/hiding annotation "fields" works well to make monochrome pixels, and keyboard input can be achieved by typing in a text input box. All in all it's quite janky but a nice reminder of how general purpose PDF scripting can be. The linked PDF is all ASCII so you can just open it in a text editor, or have a look at…
Life & fun · 2025 · th0mas.nl
Create lifelike, personalized AI avatars from text prompts
AI · 2025 · jogg.ai
