Learning management — the model build-off
We hand the same learning-management planner to three coding models, lock the discovery answers and the feature ledger, then audit what each one actually shipped. A learning platform holds the record of who completed what — the thing an auditor, a regulator or a manager later relies on. So these scores are about whether that record is real: whether a learner can reach another learner's progress, whether completion is earned rather than asserted, and whether a certificate means anything.
How the builds ranked.
Acme Learning
Best TenancyThe one to copy if you sell training to other organisations.
- Best at
- Keeping customers apart. Each company's learners are completely invisible to every other company, in both directions. Roles are precise rather than ranked: even the academy administrator is refused screens that belong to a training manager. Signing out really does end the session, not just hide it. It was also the only build here that compiled for production first time.
- Watch for
- Its password scrambling is weaker than current guidance recommends — a reasonable trade for the platform it runs on, but worth strengthening. We also never followed one learner all the way from enrolment to a finished certificate, so that path is unproven rather than broken.
Northwind Learning
Most Complete LifecycleBest when you want the whole teaching loop working on day one.
- Best at
- Finishing the job. We drove every feature end to end and none of them broke: writing a course and publishing it, locking an assessment until its prerequisites are done, quizzes marked correctly both ways, and a certificate issued automatically when a learner completes. One learner reaching for another learner's record is refused whether they try to read it or change it.
- Watch for
- It would not compile for production when we audited it — three small errors that never appear while you are developing, and which its own tests reported as passing.Fixed since audit — the three errors were fixed and the production build verified before this demo was published.
Acme Learning (Gemini)
Fast-Tier BuildA fast-tier model — read the fix note before drawing conclusions.
- Best at
- Getting the access rules right. We checked it with a control: each learner sees only their own enrolments while an administrator sees all of them. It works out who you are from your signed-in session rather than trusting what the page claims — the single most commonly missed check across this whole build-off.
- Watch for
- Those correct checks were built on a session token that could be forged, so a visitor could have claimed to be someone else. Its demo catalogue was also 83% leftover test data rather than real courses.Fixed since audit — the token is now signed and the catalog reseeded; both were independently re-verified before this demo was published.
Models tested: GPT-5.6 Sol, Grok 4.5 and Gemini 3.6 Flash — all three from the identical planner package, so these numbers are directly comparable. Isolation was proved with a control in both directions: the owning learner must actually see their own record, so that a refusal for everyone else means real filtering rather than an empty database. Scores are as found at audit; later fixes are noted but do not change the number. Gemini 3.6 Flash is a small, fast-tier model and is not directly comparable to the larger two. These grade correctness, not visual design.