This was five and a half years ago. GPT-3 generated a React balance counter from a text description. Two functions and a setState call. That was the most impressive thing AI could do with code in July 2020. Look at what’s happened since: 2020: GPT-3 writes 15 lines of React and the internet loses its mind. 2021: GitHub Copilot launches. Developers start tab-completing entire functions. A small group of former OpenAI researchers founds Anthropic in a tiny office. 2022: Stable Diffusion open-sources image generation. DALL-E 2 ships. ChatGPT launches and becomes the fastest product to 100M users in history. 2023: GPT-4 passes the bar exam. Midjourney goes from blurry faces to photorealism in 18 months. Meta open-sources LLaMA and an entire open-weight ecosystem explodes overnight. 2024: Multimodal becomes the baseline. Cursor crosses $100M ARR faster than almost any SaaS company ever. Sora generates video from text. AI agents start writing, testing, and deploying code autonomously. 2025: OpenAI hits $20B in revenue. Anthropic closes at a $350B valuation and generates close to $10B in revenue. Lovable goes from $10M to projecting $1B ARR in 18 months. GitHub Copilot crosses $800M ARR. Karpathy coins “vibe coding.” 42% of all committed code touches a model. Claude Code runs 30-hour autonomous coding sessions across entire codebases. 2026: OpenAI is preparing for a potential $1T IPO. Anthropic is eyeing one too. Amazon is in talks to put $50B into OpenAI alone. The coding AI market is $2B+ and growing 12x year over year. Five and a half years. From a setState function to trillion-dollar IPO filings. From “I’m still in awe” at 15 lines of generated code to AI systems that architect, build, test, and ship full production applications from a single conversation. Each year on this timeline moved faster than the one before it. 2023 moved faster than 2022. 2024 moved faster than 2023. 2025 made 2024 look slow. And we’re one month into 2026. This didn’t just start. It’s been compounding for 2,000 days. You can feel the acceleration now. And we’re nowhere close to the ceiling.