OpenMAIC ships v1.4.0 with PBL v3: an AI tutor walks learners through building a project, not just watching a lesson

OpenMAIC adds PBL v3, moving the learning path from reading course material to building and running a project by hand, so learners understand how it works along the way. Earlier versions centered on classroom explanation, slides and agentic classroom chat, so learner output stayed at the level of understanding, with no route that turned concepts into hands-on tasks and got a project actually running. The v1.4.0 release notes describe PBL v3 as a new way into vibe coding: build the project, then understand how it works, with an AI tutor guiding requirements, design and implementation and answering questions at any point.

PBL v3 organizes learning around milestones, each giving staged feedback that feeds a personal learning report. Classroom-side capability had been concentrated in explanation and question answering, and learner work and progress were not continuously kept per project. The release notes state that the learner's work and progress are kept so they can continue at their own pace; the feature is off by default and turns on only after a sandbox provider and checkpoint storage are configured and /pbl-v3 is opened.

This describes the functional scope and enabling conditions of PBL v3 in the OpenMAIC v1.4.0 release notes: it requires a configured sandbox provider and checkpoint storage plus opening /pbl-v3, and otherwise stays off; the notes give no learning-outcome data, so readers should treat this as a product capability description rather than evidence of teaching effectiveness.

The release notes mark this upgrade as one-way: all 1.3.x instances must be stopped first, rollback requires a database restore, and older replicas exit once a newer release migrates the database; PBL v3 is off by default and does not enable without a sandbox provider and checkpoint storage.