Technology

AI Evolution Timeline: ChatGPT to Coding Agents

ChatGPT introduced mass-market conversational generative AI in November 2022. The next phase added stronger reasoning, tool use and software-development capabi…

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CHATGPT DEBUT

OpenAI launches ChatGPT and makes conversational generative AI mainstream

OpenAI released ChatGPT as a free preview on November 30, 2022, built on GPT-3.5-era technology. Generative AI already existed; ChatGPT's real contribution was making it…

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GPT-4 LAUNCH

GPT-4 raises the reasoning and instruction-following ceiling

OpenAI released GPT-4 on March 14, 2023, with stronger reasoning, instruction-following and multimodal capability described in its technical report, rolling out to consu…

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CODING COPILOTS

AI moves into the developer's actual editor

GitHub Copilot expanded with chat-based interaction, and Claude 2 brought much larger context windows. AI was no longer a separate chat window; it was embedded inside th…

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REASONING MODELS

OpenAI's o1 spends more computation before answering

o1-preview launched September 12, 2024, and full o1 on December 5, 2024. Instead of the first plausible answer, these models work through a problem step by step, improvi…

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DEVIN DEBUT

Cognition Labs launches Devin, marketed as the first AI software engineer

Devin popularized the autonomous coding agent category in March 2024. Cognition's own reported SWE-bench Verified score for Devin 2.0 is roughly 45.8%, trailing later fr…

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AI-NATIVE EDITORS

Cursor, Claude Code and Codex turn the editor into an agent surface

Anthropic launched Claude Code in February 2025. Cursor grew into one of the fastest-growing developer tools of the decade. The IDE itself became an AI interaction surfa…

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AGENTIC CODING

Coding agents move from suggestions to full delegated tasks

The typical instruction shifted from 'write this function' to 'implement this feature, run the tests, fix what fails.' Repository-wide context and test-and-fix loops bec…

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2026 FRONTIER

Longer-running agentic workflows, not fully autonomous engineering

Codex on GPT-5.6, Claude Code on Claude Opus 5, and Google's Antigravity 2.0 can plan multi-file changes, run tests and iterate over longer sessions. This is agentic exe…

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