This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the AI coding and vibe-coding booms, follow David Pierce. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers' inboxes at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started Writing code was a killer app for AI even before anyone was really talking about AI. In the spring of 2021, 18 months before the world knew the word "ChatGPT," Microsoft debuted the very first product of a partnership with a nonprofit called OpenAI: a tool called GitHub Copilot that watched developers as they wrote code and tried to autocomplete snippets and lines for them. Read the full story at The Verge.
OpenAI is hosting a livestream event. Details about the specific announcements, product launches, or demonstrations will be revealed during the broadcast.
The last time OpenAI did an unannounced livestream, they dropped GPT-4 Turbo and changed pricing overnight
OpenAI is launching ChatGPT Images 2.0 with major upgrades to image generation capabilities. Watch the livestream announcement at https://openai.com/live/
OpenAI is positioning this as a direct competitor to established image generation tools, suggesting they're confident enough to challenge the current market leaders
Throughout 2025 the standard response to any complaint about an LLM was some version of "just wait 3-6 months, the next generation will handle this effortlessly." The argument was everywhere. Every limitation was temporary, every missing capability was a few iterations away, every autonomous agent demo was a preview of imminent reality. It's April 2026 now and worth checking how that held up. On r/ClaudeAI this week there's a long thread about Opus 4.7 where multiple users argue it's a regress
Someone actually tested Mistral Medium 3.5 on AMD's new Strix Halo chip, and the results are... not great. For a 48k-token prompt with 4k thinking tokens, it took about 2 hours just to get an answer about code architecture. Yeah, you read that right—two hours. The takeaway: if you want to run this locally on Strix Halo, queue it up before bed. The technical setup involved heavy optimization (Q5_K_XL quantization, GPU acceleration with -ngl 999, cache reuse), but even with all that tuning, it's still a crawl. Not exactly the "instant local AI" dream, but hey, at least it works.