Earlier this week, someone asked me if they were perhaps late to making use of AI-assisted development, as they dove into it in the past 2 months (using GitHub Copilot) and are already seeing large gains in a small team in terms of leverage of time. I thought for a second and responded that they might have seen comparably worthwhile gains roughly a year ago. In this post, I’m going to take a look back over the past years to try and figure out what the timeline has actually looked like.
My own vauge memory isn’t very certain, and roughly speaking pre COVID I dont remember much AI being used in software development, and after COVID we were in the AI era? The first place I personally remember using assisted development was via the initial VSCode GitHub Copilot auto completions, which were at the time questionably useful to start with but still showed promise. Included along the way will likely be the first version of Claude Code, Gemini entering the scene, and within GitHub copilot the advancements from completions, to ask & edit, to agent, and finally autopilot and cloud agents.
2017 – 2022: The Transformer era
- June 2017: The “Attention Is All You Need” paper was published by Google, introducing the the Transformer architecture and paving the way for the era of transformer models.
- June 2018: OpenAI releases GPT-1.
- February 2019: OpenAI releases GPT-2.
- November 2019: Initial COVID19 outbreaks.
- March 2020: WHO declare COVID19 a pandemic.
- June 2020: OpenAI releases GPT-3. Developers discover its ability to generate HTML, CSS and code snippets despite not being trained for programming.
And although there are other notable mentions, such as BERT by Google in 2018 and CodeBERT in 2020, most of the above comes far before most people will have started looking at or using AI for coding, and that includes me. As I initially started using models during development with the introduction of GitHub Copilot and the autocompletions within VSCode.
GitHub Copilot Technical Preview (June 2021+)
My email innivation to the GitHub Copilot Technical Preview came back in on the 8th July 2021, and it looks like the public announcement on the GitHub blog can still be found dated 29th June 2021.
