Comment by simonw
4 hours ago
Claude Code was released in February, it just had its 1 year birthday a few days ago.
OpenAI Codex CLI and Gemini CLI followed a few months afterwards
It took a little while for the right set of coding agent features to be developed and for the models to get good enough to use those features effectively.
I think this stuff went from interesting to useful around Sonnet 4, and from useful to "let it write most of my code" with the upgrades in November.
Aider with Gemini 2.5 was way ahead of its time, and with O3 it was best in class until Claude Code with Sonnet 4.