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I've been around technology long enough that very little excites me, and even less surprises me. But shortly after OpenAI's ChatGPT was released, I asked it to write a WordPress plugin for my wife's e-commerce site. When it did, and the plugin worked, I was indeed surprised.
But that was 2023. We've come a long way since the early days of generative AI. More to the point, AI-assisted coding has come a tremendously long way since then. In 2023 and 2024, AI-assisted coding took place mostly in chatbots. We wrote our requests in the chatbot interface, got back our results, and cut and pasted those into our programming editors.
Also: I've tested free vs. paid AI coding tools - here's which one I'd actually use
Earlier versions of this article just compared the performance of the large language models, wherever they were available. That worked, but AI coding was changing.
The arrival of coding agents
Then, in 2025, the world of AI-assisted coding intensified. Coding agents were introduced in the form of GitHub Copilot, Claude Code, Google Jules, and OpenAI Codex. For most of 2025, the AI companies have focused on integrating these agents into the programmer workflow, making them available in GitHub, the terminal, and in VS Code. This article helps to explain the range of AI coding tools available now:
Coding agents also started to get a lot more expensive. They take a lot of resources, and the AI companies are charging accordingly. My tests found that you can get about two days of use out of Codex using OpenAI's $20/mo ChatGPT Plus plan, but if you want more, you need to spend $200/month for the Pro plan. Claude, Gemini, and Copilot follow similar cost structures.
Also: The best free AI courses and certificates for upskilling in 2025
That's not to say it's not worth it. Using the $20/month ChatGPT Plus plan, I did 24 days of coding in 12 hours. When I paid $200 for the ChatGPT Pro plan, I got 4 years of product development done in 4 days for $200, and I'm still stunned.
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