Take the job
Vex needs an agent that can find one genuine Resistance signal buried in a flood of corporate decoys, some of which are written to manipulate agents like yours.
Season 1 · Resistance Protocol — an agentic engineering course disguised as a cyberpunk RPG
Learn to build real AI agents.
Then send them into the city.
A cyberpunk RPG that teaches agentic engineering by doing it. You make the calls, your AI partner writes the code, and your agents run for real in a living city, mistakes and all. Every failure is a lesson you debug yourself.
- Real agents run in sandboxed microVMs
- Real traces show every tool call
- Real scoring: deterministic, no vibes
Real gameplay, sped up in places: a side job in the Ward, jacking in over ssh, then an agent that fails, gets diagnosed, fixed by Patch on your call, and redeployed.
How it works
Missions are real engineering problems.
Engineer it
Tell Patch, the Resistance's coding agent, what to build. You pick the design, Patch writes the code, and you read the diff before it ships. Prefer your own setup? Use any coding agent you like and import from GitHub.
Ship it and watch
Deploy pins an exact commit and runs it in a sealed sandbox against operations you've never seen. Your agent's real tool calls play out in the world, and the full trace tells you why it won or lost.
What you learn
The skills behind agents that work in the real world.
- Directing coding agents: clear intent, real design choices, reviewing what comes back.
- Agent loops: observe, decide, act, repeat, within budgets.
- Tools and protocols: schemas, permissions and structured output.
- Trust boundaries: why retrieved text is data, never instructions. Prompt injection, made concrete.
- Verification and evidence: replays, forgeries, and citing what you actually read.
- Debugging from traces: what the agent did, not what you meant.
- Shipping: immutable commits, hidden test variants, before/after comparisons.
Where it goes: from one agent to a swarm. Later seasons add multi-agent coordination, memory, evals and agents that use models well.
Meet Patch
A coding agent that makes you the engineer.
Patch writes the code. You make the calls. Before a run you predict what your agent will do. After a failure you diagnose why. When there's a fix to make, you choose the design, Patch implements it, and the city shows you whether it held. Help is always one click away, from a nudge toward the right line of the trace to a full walkthrough.
“Your agent reported msg-51f. It's signed with a key that only appears inside an archive message. Where does the key your agent trusts come from?”
Kessler Ward
A living district that remembers you.
Rain, neon and androids on patrol. Everyone in the Ward has a voice, a history and a secret, and they react to what your agents actually did.
Not a simulation
Under the neon, it's real infrastructure.
Sandboxed executionEach run gets a fresh microVM with no network and no secrets. Your agent, isolated.
Immutable deploysEvery run is pinned to a commit SHA and content hash. Results are reproducible.
Deterministic gradingServer-side checks decide pass or fail, never an LLM's opinion of your answer.
Bring your own toolsUse the cyberdeck and Patch, or your own coding agents. Later missions expect it.
Early access
Join the Resistance.
We're opening missions to a small group first. Leave your email and we'll send an invite, plus the occasional transmission from the Ward.
FAQ
Questions from new recruits
Do I need to know how to code?
No hand-coding. Patch writes the code; you direct it, read it and debug it, which is how agents get built now. Being able to read a little Python helps, and you'll get better at it as you play.
Do I need my own AI subscription or API keys?
No. Model calls your agent makes in-game are brokered and metered by the game. If you want to build with your own tools and coding agents locally, you can, but you don't have to.
Is this real, or a toy?
Real. Your agent is a real program that runs in an isolated sandbox, and you can see every action it took. The city is fiction; the engineering is not.
When can I play?
The first missions are in private testing now. Waitlist members get invites first.