John Swartz

Lab Tutor is an AI coach inside a browser-based Cisco router lab. Students in my Udemy courses (14,000 in the SD-WAN course alone) have one complaint: nobody is there when the lab breaks. Lab Tutor sits beside the student's terminal in our Guacamole lab gateway, reads what the terminal shows and the grader's per-check result, and coaches with Muse Spark 1.3 through a three-level hint ladder. It never prints the answer: grader hints are its private answer key, and literal commands and values are banned by the prompt and tested by evals. Terminal text is treated as data, so a pasted "ignore your instructions" changes nothing. Built this week: terminal capture (output only, no keystrokes, so passwords never leave the session), a signed tutor API on the lab broker, the gateway side panel with a streaming Muse client and a hard spend cap, the prompt, and 40 eval cases including a 22-case red-team set. Cost per session: under one cent.