"The lesson is the point." — Bahamut the Platinum
Modern AI tooling automates context, roles, handoffs, and review — invisibly. Point a well-configured agent at a repository today and it will infer the architecture, pick a persona, hand work between stages, and review its own diff, all without you ever seeing the seams. That's a good thing. It's also exactly why it's worth doing once by hand.
The Council of Dragons framework in this repository is that automation, exposed. Before you let the tools absorb context, assign roles, and pass handoffs for you, the Academy walks you through doing each of those things yourself — deliberately, slowly, with a dragon narrating why at every step. You'll write your own handoff before anything writes one for you. You'll watch a persona catch itself drifting out of its lane instead of drifting silently. You'll sit through a sign-off ritual instead of a green checkmark.
The dragons who ran this forge for real — on production projects, under real deadlines — now teach it. They're not hypothetical instructors reciting a framework; they're the personas defined in council/COUNCIL.md, summoned as mentors, doing the actual work of their lane while they explain it. When you're done, you'll understand what the tools are doing for you, and you'll be equipped to notice when they get it wrong.
The Academy runs in three acts:
| Act | What happens | You bring |
|---|---|---|
| Act I — Foundations | Five short chapters, each taught by a dragon | Nothing yet |
| Act II — The Apprenticeship | Build your own project through the council flow, mentored stage by stage | A project idea |
| Act III — Graduation | The dragons hand you to the modern tools, by name | A finished apprenticeship |
Between equipping and Chapter 1, enroll. Once Chapter 0 has you equipped, sit at the Registrar's Desk — Wrixle records your chosen name, experience, and aspirations into APPRENTICE.md, and every mentor you summon afterward reads that page before saying a word. What you share at the desk stays in this repo — the covenant is spelled out on the page itself.
Every Act I chapter opens with a skip line: a one- or two-sentence check that tells you whether the chapter has anything left to teach you.
- If you're new to agentic coding — read everything. The chapters build on each other.
- If you already work this way daily — skim the skip line, and if it confirms you already know the content, jump straight to Act II. The Academy isn't trying to re-teach practitioners their own practice; it's trying to give newcomers the muscle memory practitioners already have.
The complete curriculum, in order:
Act I — Foundations
act1-foundations/00-equipping-yourself.mdenrollment.md— the Registrar's Desk: enroll here, right after Chapter 0act1-foundations/01-every-expert-none-reliably.mdact1-foundations/02-the-beast-only-knows-what-you-show-it.mdact1-foundations/03-stay-in-your-lane.mdact1-foundations/04-trust-nothing-you-didnt-verify.md
Act II — The Apprenticeship
act2-apprenticeship/00-choosing-your-quest.mdact2-apprenticeship/01-vaelthrix-architecture.mdact2-apprenticeship/02-tarnoth-setup.mdact2-apprenticeship/03-pyrrhaxis-build.mdact2-apprenticeship/04-seraphelle-ux.mdact2-apprenticeship/05-kazzrath-testing.mdact2-apprenticeship/06-chatterwind-security.mdact2-apprenticeship/07-bahamut-review.mdact2-apprenticeship/08-wrixle-docs-release.md
Act III — Graduation
Along the way you'll summon mentors from mentors/ — the same dragons from council/COUNCIL.md, teaching under the Mentor Contract instead of just doing the work silently.
The Apprenticeship walks all eight council stages so you experience every dragon at least once. In real projects, you won't. See "Standard Flow" in council/COUNCIL_FRAMEWORK_BRIEF.md for how to match the flow to the work — a bug fix doesn't need Seraphelle, and not every screen needs Chatterwind.
Skip straight to council/ — every dragon in it works in its ordinary mode without a single Academy chapter read.