Reviving My Linux Mastery Game from a Merge Conflict — A Finish-Up-A-Thon Comeback

*This is a submission for the GitHub Finish-Up-A-Thon Challenge*

What I Built

Enterprise Linux Mastery Game — a local-first, AI-mentored terminal game for practicing real enterprise Linux administration. The mentor sets a scenario (a paging-hour incident, a permissions puzzle, a 5xx spike). You type Linux commands. They run inside a hardened Docker sandbox. An AI judge grades you on correctness, safety, and efficiency and gives coaching feedback.

I started it as a January side-project that I genuinely cared about — I work in enterprise IT training and I've watched too many engineers learn Linux the wrong way, by memorising commands instead of investigating systems. The game was meant to fix that for myself and the trainees I work with.

Then I hit a wall. The repo sat for four months with a visible merge conflict in the README and a backend wired to a paid LLM API I'd lost access to. The Finish-Up-A-Thon was the push I needed to actually finish it.