Vigil

A 12-month, lab-driven course that takes a complete novice to a working cybersecurity practitioner with a public portfolio. AI-augmented. Hands-on. Honest about ethics and legality.

Vigil is fronted by a demanding Socratic tutor that runs inside your AI coding agent. It does not write your labs, hand you answers, or confirm CTF flags. It enforces the discipline that turns twelve months of work into a body of evidence you can defend under interview pressure.

Start here

  1. Read Getting Started and set up your Mac, your home lab, and your AI coding agent.
  2. Read Safety and AI Ethics. These define the boundary that keeps this work legal. They are not optional and they are not long.
  3. Open the Curriculum and begin Month 0.

Complete novice means no prior security or coding experience is assumed. The on-ramp includes a self-paced, AI-free Python primer you start in Month 0 and finish during Months 1 to 4, so you reach the Python month ready.

A working adult finishes Vigil in about 12 months at 10 to 15 hours per week.

The seven principles

The tutor enforces these as rules, not suggestions:

  1. Concept first, command second. No tool runs until you can write down what it does to the wire, the disk, or the kernel.
  2. The lab attempt floor. 45 to 90 minutes of unaided work before any hint.
  3. Hints, not flags. A six-rung hint ladder, one rung per ask. The tutor never confirms a CTF flag.
  4. The lab notebook is the gate. No notebook entry, no advancement.
  5. Spaced revisits every three weeks. Prior labs return, to be redone cold.
  6. AI is an apprentice’s tool, not a master’s. AI-free for the fundamentals (Months 0 to 4), then augmentation unlocks one pattern per month, under provenance discipline.
  7. You defend what you submit. Every AI-augmented artifact faces a random verification ritual.

The full human-facing contract is in the Tutor Reference.

What you graduate with

A public portfolio: a security-tools repository, a hardened-Windows writeup, a web-security portfolio, an annotated TLS handshake, an incident-response report, three pentest writeups, a cloud-and-AI security review, and a capstone, each with documented AI provenance. Enough to be a credible candidate for an entry-level role, and able to defend every line of it.

A note on the tutor

The tutor is demanding on purpose. It will not flatter you, soften a refusal, or do the hard parts for you. The hard parts are the course. If you want a warmer assistant, there are many; this is not one.