# How CoLateral began: September 2025 to June 2026 | CoLateral Source: https://colateralai.com/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026 [Home](/) [Blog](/blog) [History](/blog/category/history) # How CoLateral began: September 2025 to June 2026 CoLateral began with a two-line README on 2025-09-29, sat idle for more than seven months, and then, from 2026-05-08, grew in a few weeks into a dashboard of standalone tools, a public website and a first AI runtime. [Nic Vandewetering](/blog/authors/nic) - October 8, 2026 - 6 min read Covers September 2025 to June 2026 ### On this page 1. [Why does the history of CoLateral start with two commits and a gap?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#why-does-the-history-of-colateral-start-with-two-commits-and-a-g) 2. [What did CoLateral look like in May 2026?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#what-did-colateral-look-like-in-may-2026) 3. [How did the CoLateral public website start?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#how-did-the-colateral-public-website-start) 4. [Where did AI come in during the first months?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#where-did-ai-come-in-during-the-first-months) 5. [What was the original product vision?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#what-was-the-original-product-vision) 6. [Why did the first design stop working?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#why-did-the-first-design-stop-working) 7. [What came next for CoLateral?](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#what-came-next-for-colateral) 8. [Frequently asked questions](/blog/colateral-origins-2025-2026#faq) Nothing in that first design looked like today's Project Canvas, which is exactly why it is worth telling accurately. This is part 1 of [the history of CoLateral](/blog/history-of-colateral), and it covers September 2025 to the end of June 2026. ## Key takeaways - CoLateral's repository has exactly two commits in 2025, both dated 2025-09-29, and no commits at all between then and 2026-05-08. - CoLateral recorded 266 commits in May 2026 and 1,330 in June 2026, which is the period in which it became a dashboard of tools with a public website. - CoLateral took the name "CoLateral AI" on 2026-05-10, and its first AI runtime foundation was committed on 2026-05-27. - By 2026-06-29 the CoLateral repository held about 70 standalone tool pages, a website and an application in one tree, and that mix is what the desktop pivot set out to separate. Series The history of CoLateral 1. Part 0 [The history of CoLateral, 2025 to October 2026](/blog/history-of-colateral) 2. Part 1 How CoLateral began: September 2025 to June 2026 3. Part 2 [From tool dashboard to Project Canvas, June to July 2026](/blog/from-tool-dashboard-to-project-canvas) 4. Part 3 [CoLateral goes desktop with Tauri, July to August 2026](/blog/colateral-goes-desktop-with-tauri) 5. Part 4 [From tool shelf to agentic workspace, Aug to Oct 2026](/blog/from-tool-shelf-to-agentic-workspace) 6. Part 9 [What CoLateral looked like, from 2025 to today](/blog/colateral-visual-history) ## Why does the history of CoLateral start with two commits and a gap? Because that is what the repository says, and a history that hid it would not be worth reading. The first commit, dated 2025-09-29, is an "Initial commit" that adds a two-line README under the working name Lateral. Later the same day a stock continuous-integration workflow file was added. After that, the commit log has nothing until 2026-05-08. We do not know from the repository why the work paused, and we are not going to guess. What the record does show is the restart. On 2026-05-08 the first commit of the active period added a small command-line program that generated sets of prompts for AI assistants, and it arrived through a pull request opened by a coding agent. From that date the history is continuous. If you want the whole span at a glance, the [pillar history](/blog/history-of-colateral) has the month-by-month commit table. - 2 commits in 2025, both on 2025-09-29 - 266 commits in May 2026 - 1,330 commits in June 2026 - 2026-05-10 renamed CoLateral AI ## What did CoLateral look like in May 2026? It looked like a dashboard. Over its first days the project gained cloud sign-in and project storage (2026-05-09), a tool dashboard page (2026-05-09) that became the root entry point of the site on 2026-05-10, and a rename to "CoLateral AI" the same day. The history of an earlier repository called Lateral was merged in on 2026-05-09, which is why the first week of work contains several changes that look like moves rather than inventions. The tools themselves were standalone web pages, each a single static page with no build step, built by the founder for engineering work. That "no build step" habit is still in the repository's own description of itself: the application has no production build, and the marketing site is built separately. Static pages are easy to host, which is why a GitHub Pages deployment was enabled on 2026-05-12 and fixed over the following days, and easy for an AI agent to edit, which mattered more than anyone knew at the time. The dashboard grew a search bar on 2026-05-15, a redesign with a navigation dropdown, and a settings area on 2026-06-05. The work was fast and incremental, with many small pull requests merged each day, and branch names that show Claude and Codex agents doing much of the typing at the founder's direction. That process, a person setting direction and agents doing much of the typing, is the through-line of the whole history. ## How did the CoLateral public website start? Within weeks. The About page landed on 2026-05-19 and was reworked in the following days. A pricing page and a careers page followed on 2026-05-24. On 2026-05-25 the project added Terms of Service and a Privacy Policy, a Security and Trust page, a public agents page, a use cases page, and a blog called Field Notes. A self-hosted function replaced a third-party form service for the careers form the same day. Field Notes was the first blog, and it is a useful marker for this one. It was merged with the blog into a single "Blog" navigation entry on 2026-06-07, and the public Roadmap page was removed the same day. The Field Notes era was short. The [blog you are reading](/blog/introducing-the-colateral-blog) is its descendant, rebuilt as a proper section of the site with its own renderer, feeds and structured data. Pricing is the clearest example of a decision that changed fast. The pricing page was revamped into a four-plan structure on 2026-05-25. On 2026-06-29 a change replaced the four monthly subscription tiers with a single one-time licence. The one-time licence model has stayed. For what it is today, see [pricing](/pricing). ## Where did AI come in during the first months? Earlier than the canvas, but in a different shape. The first commit of the active period was an AI prompt generator. On 2026-05-26 a project workspace MVP was committed. On 2026-05-27 came the foundational AI runtime architecture and a developer panel, and the same day a guided AI tool builder that was simplified to a single prompt textbox before the day ended. A versioned prompt registry followed on 2026-06-01. That AI layer was a foundation, not a live agent. The repository later describes it as a "mock-safe AI runtime with project memory". The idea of a user building their own tool from a prompt is an early form of the "Build a tool" button that sits in the Project Canvas dock today. The idea of an AI that works while you watch did not arrive until the agent and terminal work of July, which [the next post in the series](/blog/from-tool-dashboard-to-project-canvas) covers. ## What was the original product vision? A roadmap file was added on 2026-05-15, and it set out a large ambition: a single hub where a firm manages design, analysis, coordination, deliverables and business operations. The file is still in the repository, with a banner added later that marks it as archived and says what changed. > The product is no longer a dashboard-with-a-tool-launcher awaiting a "Project Hub". It is an infinite Project Canvas (project-canvas.html) that spawns tools, notes, calcs and agent cards, plus a Tauri desktop shell (apps/desktop/) with Ed25519 licence activation, a local agent bridge (apps/bridge/), a mock-safe AI runtime with project memory (packages/ai-runtime/), a marketing site split out to apps/web/, and ~70 tools under tools/. Source: CoLateral ROADMAP.md, archived banner One small honesty note: that file's banner says it was written in May 2025, but the commit that added it is dated 2026-05-15. We use the commit date, because the commit record is the evidence we can check. The banner's summary of what changed since is, in any case, an accurate one-paragraph version of the rest of this series. ## Why did the first design stop working? By late June 2026 the repository had grown three concerns that did not belong together. A planning document written on 2026-06-29 names them: marketing and website pages at the top level, the application and its dashboard, and a shared layer of code. The document's own description of the problem is blunt. > Three concerns are interleaved in one tree Source: CoLateral docs/desktop-pivot-migration-plan.md, section 1 The same document counts 71 tool folders and observes there is no build step, so the site, the dashboard and every tool were deployed together as one flat static site. That was a fine way to move fast in May. It was a poor foundation for a product people would download, update and pay for once. The work that followed is the subject of [the next post](/blog/from-tool-dashboard-to-project-canvas). The dashboard era is why CoLateral still has a one-time licence, a static-first application with no production build, and a website that is built separately from the app. Those were decided here, and they held. ## What came next for CoLateral? On a single day, 2026-06-29, the project wrote its desktop migration plan, extracted shared code into packages, added a minimal Tauri v2 shell and committed the first Project Canvas. [From tool dashboard to Project Canvas](/blog/from-tool-dashboard-to-project-canvas) tells that story. If you want to see how these early screens looked, the [visual history](/blog/colateral-visual-history) has captures era by era, and the [download page](/download) has the app as it is now. FAQ ## Frequently asked questions ### When was the first CoLateral commit? The first commit in the CoLateral repository is dated 2025-09-29 and adds a two-line README under the working name Lateral. A stock workflow file was added the same day. There are no further commits until 2026-05-08. ### What was the first thing built in CoLateral? The first commit of the active period, on 2026-05-08, added a small command-line generator for sets of AI prompts. A dashboard of standalone tools followed within a day, with cloud sign-in and project storage on 2026-05-09. ### When did CoLateral get its name? The dashboard was renamed "CoLateral AI" on 2026-05-10, a day after the history of an earlier repository called Lateral was merged in. The brand has since been simplified to CoLateral, with colateralai.com as the website. ### Did CoLateral always have a blog? A blog called Field Notes was added on 2026-05-25 and merged into a single Blog entry on 2026-06-07. The current CoLateral blog launched on 2026-10-08 as a separate section of the site, with this history as one of its first posts. ### Was CoLateral always built by AI agents? Much of the early work arrived through pull requests opened by AI coding agents that the founder directed, and the repository is arranged so that agents can work in it. The direction, the decisions and the product judgement are Nic Vandewetering's, and the build is done in public. Written by ## [Nic Vandewetering](/blog/authors/nic) Founder and CEO, CoLateral Nic Vandewetering is the founder of CoLateral and builds the workspace in public, often live on YouTube. These posts record what changed and why. [About CoLateral](/about) [YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/@nicvandewetering) [X](https://x.com/nvandewetering) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/nic-vandewetering-55358a1a5) [Post on X](https://x.com/intent/post?text=How%20CoLateral%20began%3A%20September%202025%20to%20June%202026&url=https%3A%2F%2Fcolateralai.com%2Fblog%2Fcolateral-origins-2025-2026) [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/sharing/share-offsite/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcolateralai.com%2Fblog%2Fcolateral-origins-2025-2026) [Newer post CoLateral Marketing: Social Posts on Your Canvas](/blog/colateral-marketing-social-media-card) [Older post CoLateral Release Notes for 2026](/blog/colateral-release-notes-2026) ## Keep reading History ### [The history of CoLateral, 2025 to October 2026](/blog/history-of-colateral) The history of CoLateral from its first commit on 2025-09-29 to October 2026: tool dashboard, Project Canvas, Tauri desktop app and agentic workspace. Oct 8, 2026 - 13 min read History ### [From tool dashboard to Project Canvas, June to July 2026](/blog/from-tool-dashboard-to-project-canvas) How CoLateral went from a tool dashboard to the Project Canvas on 2026-06-29, then added Agent Cards and Terminal Cards for Claude Code and Codex on 2026-07-02. Oct 8, 2026 - 7 min read History ### [CoLateral goes desktop with Tauri, July to August 2026](/blog/colateral-goes-desktop-with-tauri) How CoLateral became a desktop app: the Tauri shell, the website split on 2026-07-26, a closed beta and releases 1.0.1 to 1.0.9 for Windows, macOS and Linux. Oct 8, 2026 - 7 min read ## Bring your next project together. CoLateral is a desktop workspace where your files, notes, tools and AI agents share one canvas. Connect your own provider account when an agent needs one, and see how it fits your work. [Get the desktop app](/download) [See pricing](/pricing)