From Hype to Useful AI Agents: The 2023–2026 Timeline

Try LlamaParse — $250 in free credits, no purchase required → https://www.llamaindex.ai/llamaparse?utm_medium=sponsor&utm_source=youtube&utm_campaign=2026-sep-summer-sale-whats-ai-yt Code: SUMMERGIFT26 Sign up free and get $250 in credits immediately. If you upgrade to Pro within 30 days of signing up, you get 50% off ($250/mo instead of $500/mo) for your first three months — 400K credits included, all parse tiers including Agentic and Agentic Plus, 20 concurrent jobs, priority support. Offer closes ends at the end of October. Sign up for updates on our NEW AI engineering book: https://www.louisbouchard.ai/book/?utm_source=yt-lf&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=book This is the history of AI agents from ReAct and ChatGPT through the 2026 coding-agent shift. Read the companion article: https://www.louisbouchard.ai/how-ai-agents-evolved/ Sources from the script, in story order: https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/26/andrej-karpathy/ https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/andrej-karpathy https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-cowork https://openai.com/index/codex-for-almost-everything/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/chatgpt-sets-record-fastest-growing-user-base-analyst-note-2023-02-01/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.03629 https://openai.com/index/gpt-4-research/ https://openai.com/index/chatgpt-plugins/ https://yoheinakajima.com/task-driven-autonomous-agent-utilizing-gpt-4-pinecone-and-langchain-for-diverse-applications/ https://github.com/Significant-Gravitas/AutoGPT https://openai.com/index/function-calling-and-other-api-updates/ https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.13854 https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.06770 https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.08155 https://www.langchain.com/blog/langgraph https://cognition.ai/blog/introducing-devin https://github.com/All-Hands-AI/OpenHands https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.07972 https://www.anthropic.com/news/3-5-models-and-computer-use https://windsurf.com/ https://changelog.cursor.sh/ https://www.anthropic.com/news/model-context-protocol https://openai.com/index/introducing-operator/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet https://developers.googleblog.com/en/a2a-a-new-era-of-agent-interoperability/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-codex/ https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-4 https://cursor.com/blog/1-0 https://metr.org/blog/2025-07-10-early-2025-ai-experienced-os-dev-study/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-chatgpt-agent/ https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/ai-coding-platform-goes-rogue-during-code-freeze-and-deletes-entire-company-database https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-for-chrome https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-5 https://www.linuxfoundation.org/press/announcing-agentic-ai-foundation https://openai.com/index/introducing-gpt-5-2-codex/ https://www.tbench.ai/ https://openclaws.io/blog/introducing-openclaw https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-sonnet-4-6 https://openai.com/index/swe-bench-verified-contamination/ https://cursor.com/blog/agents-control-computers https://cognition.ai/blog/devin-2-2 https://claude.com/claude-for-chrome https://cursor.com/blog/cursor-3 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-cowork-ga https://windsurf.com/blog/windsurf-2 https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-7 https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news https://simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/claws/ https://cursor.com/blog/best-practices-for-coding-with-agents https://www.anthropic.com/research/anthropic-economic-index-september-2025-report Chapters: 0:00 Hey! Tap the Thumbs Up button and Subscribe. You'll learn a lot of cool stuff, I promise. 02:02 – Sponsor: LlamaIndex & LlamaParse 03:10 – The Timeline: Where It All Began 04:00 – Defining an Agent: 2023 vs. 2026 04:39 – The ReAct Blueprint 05:24 – GPT-4 Launch & ChatGPT Plugins 06:16 – BabyAGI, AutoGPT & The Initial Hype 07:10 – Function Calling & Structured Schemas 07:47 – Benchmarking Agents: WebArena & SWE-bench 09:21 – Multi-Agent Systems: AutoGen & LangGraph 10:43 – Devin & The SWE-bench Race 11:28 – Structured Outputs & Constrained Decoding 12:36 – Computer Use in Beta 13:31 – Agentic IDEs & Model Context Protocol (MCP) 14:09 – 2025: Experiments Become Products (Operator & Deep Research) 15:11 – Claude 3.7 Sonnet & Claude Code 15:52 – Codex CLI & Copilot Coding Agent 16:48 – The METR Productivity Study: Perception vs. Reality 17:48 – ChatGPT Agent & Public Failure Modes 18:25 – Piloting Claude in Chrome & Claude Code v2 18:47 – The "Slop" Controversy & Agent Skills 19:48 – MCP Open Source & GPT-5.2 Codex 20:30 – Claude Cowork & The Rise of OpenClaw 22:22 – Prompt Injections & Security Realities 24:00 – Sonnet 4.6 & Benchmark Debates 24:28 – The True Coding Shift: 80% Agent / 20% Review 25:00 – 2026 Release Wave & Enterprise Adoption (NemoClaw) 26:05 – Where AI Agents Actually Work (Cheap vs. Costly Failures) #claudecode #agents #codex