Dad HQ

Four decisions shape everything here:

• Real tools, not a sandbox. He builds in Hermes on his own laptop, with real files in a real folder. There is no "academic version" to graduate from later.
• A free model, so he can iterate without limits. Meta's Muse Spark 1.3 Contributor tier is free through Hermes, has vision (it can look at his screenshots), and is strong at code. He will spend hours; the meter never runs.
• Browser games in Phaser 3. Double-click to play, one file to start, and the model writes Phaser reliably because it has seen so much of it.
• The prompts are the curriculum. Every quest is a real game, but what he is actually practicing is talking to an AI well: giving the full picture, one change at a time, reporting bugs precisely, asking for options, finding blind spots, pivoting, and combining tools. Those seven Power-Ups are the spine, and they transfer to everything he will ever do with AI.

The free tier is called contributor because Meta may use what is sent to it to improve its models. For this course that means his game-building prompts, code, and any screenshots he drags in. No accounts are created in his name, no personal details are part of the curriculum, and the Coach persona tells him never to share passwords or personal information.

If you would rather not contribute data, the swap is one setting: pick any paid model in arcade model (the paid Muse Spark 1.3, or anything else Hermes offers) and everything else stays the same.

Do this on his laptop, in a terminal, with Hermes already installed. The first command creates a separate, clean Hermes profile named arcade; nothing touches your own Hermes setup.

hermes profile create arcade --no-skills
mkdir -p ~/ArcadeLab
arcade config set terminal.cwd ~/ArcadeLab
arcade model

In the model picker choose provider opencode-free and model muse-spark-1.3-contributor-free. Then install the Coach skill from this site (replace the domain with wherever you deployed it):

arcade skills install https://vibe-coding-games-course.vercel.app/skills/arcade-lab/SKILL.md

Hermes scans the skill and asks you to confirm; it is a community-trust install, which is expected. Next, give the profile its personality: open https://vibe-coding-games-course.vercel.app/skills/arcade-lab/SOUL.md, copy the whole thing, and paste it over the contents of ~/.hermes/profiles/arcade/SOUL.md.

Finally, add the kid-safe block to ~/.hermes/profiles/arcade/config.yaml (see the next section), then verify:

arcade doctor
arcade chat -q "/arcade-lab hello"

The second command should come back with Coach saying hello and asking for a studio name. Open Hermes Desktop, pick the arcade profile in the left rail, and hand over the laptop.

Voice: in Hermes Desktop, the microphone button sits next to the message box; macOS asks once for mic permission. Speech-to-text is on by default using the free local option. Try it once yourself before his first session — typing a full-picture prompt with two fingers was the slowest minute of every simulated session.

Paste this into ~/.hermes/profiles/arcade/config.yaml (merge with what is there; keep the model section Hermes wrote):

toolsets: [arcade-kid]
custom_toolsets:
  arcade-kid: [file, terminal, skills, vision, clarify, todo, memory, web, session_search]
approvals:
  mode: smart
  deny:
    - 'sudo *'
    - 'rm -rf *'
    - 'git push*'
    - '*curl*|*sh*'
    - '*wget*|*sh*'
    - 'npm publish*'

What each piece does:

• Toolset — files, terminal, skills, vision (screenshots), a clarify tool, a to-do list, memory (Coach remembers his studio name and games), web search for docs, and session search. No browser automation, no delegation to other agents, no cron jobs, no image generation.
• Approvals: smart — Hermes's default. Ordinary commands run; genuinely dangerous ones are auto-denied or ask. He should rarely see a prompt.
• Deny list — things a 9-year-old never needs, blocked even if something asks nicely: sudo, recursive deletes, pushing to any git remote, piping downloads to a shell, publishing packages.
• Optional, stronger: add HERMES_WRITE_SAFE_ROOT=/Users/HIS-NAME/ArcadeLab:/Users/HIS-NAME/.hermes/profiles/arcade to ~/.hermes/profiles/arcade/.env. Hermes's file-writing tools are then confined to the lab and the profile. Honest limit: the terminal tool still runs as his user account, so this is a guardrail against an honest-but-wrong agent, not a sandbox against a hostile one. The deny list plus Coach's own rules cover the realistic risks.

Your job is not to fix things. Your job is to be the person he shows things to.

• Watch, don't help. When he is stuck, the urge to grab the keyboard is enormous. Don't. Every quest has a Stuck? section and Coach has a hint ladder. Let the system work.
• Ask the three questions. "What did you try?" "What did you expect to happen?" "What's one totally different way?" Those are the Power-Ups in parent form.
• Celebrate specifics. Not "great job" — "you told Coach exactly what you expected and what happened; that's why it got fixed."
• Every quest ends with a Show Dad moment. It has a question for you to ask. Ask it. The question checks understanding, not output — he can have a working game and still not know why; the question finds that out.
• Never fix it yourself. If something is genuinely broken beyond him, sit next to him and have him type the prompt.

Two sessions a week, about 45 minutes each, works well. One quest per session early on; later quests take two or three sessions and that is fine. One Show Dad per session, five minutes, at the end.

Signs it is working: he starts sessions without being asked; he uses Power-Up language on his own ("I'll give it the full picture"); he pivots instead of repeating "try again." Signs to slow down: the same quest for three sessions with no ship, or frustration that looks like tears rather than focus. Either one means go back one quest and rebuild confidence.

• AI for building: $0. The contributor tier through Hermes is free.
• Art: ChatGPT for sprites and logos. Use your own account, in the room, at least until he has the sprite recipe down. A free ChatGPT account works; image limits apply.
• Everything else: $0. Phaser is open source and loads from a CDN. The Studio Server is Python's built-in web server, already on the laptop.

If you later swap to a paid model for privacy, that is the only line that changes.

• Slash command does nothing (/arcade-lab) — the skill is not installed in the arcade profile. Run arcade skills list and look for arcade-lab; reinstall with the command above.
• Coach sounds like generic Hermes — the SOUL.md paste did not land. Check ~/.hermes/profiles/arcade/SOUL.md contains "You are Coach"
• Model errors or empty replies — run arcade model and confirm muse-spark-1.3-contributor-free on opencode-free. Free tiers occasionally rate-limit; wait a minute.
• Pictures don't show in a game — he double-clicked index.html. That is the Quest 6 lesson: games with pictures must run through the Studio Server (http://localhost:...). Coach starts it on request.
• "Port already in use" — an old server is still running. Ask Coach to use a different port, or restart the laptop.
• Hermes wants to update — let it. Run hermes update; skills and profiles are preserved.
• He hits an approval prompt — read it with him. If it is a dangerous-command prompt, the answer is almost always deny, and the lesson is "ask Coach for a different way."