The Genesis (Sep-Nov 2024)

The journey of Improve ImgSLI began in September 2024, initially conceived with ChatGPT's assistance to address a personal need for straightforward image comparison. The early version provided basic side-by-side functionality. The following month, October, marked an enhancement phase using Claude, which introduced a magnifier tool and drag-and-drop support, significantly improving usability. By November, further refinements to the magnifier were implemented, but the codebase's expansion made complete code regeneration impractical, necessitating manual integration.

Finding the Right Tools (Jan-Mar 2025)

A turning point came in January 2025 when a user request for dynamic window resizing led to the exploration of DeepSeek, which successfully guided the implementation of this crucial feature. February brought renewed focus, leveraging Claude Sonnet 3.7 and Grok 3 for significant feature additions and bug fixes, including dynamic image swapping, a multilingual dictionary, and optimized rendering. Late March was dedicated to cross-platform compatibility, a solo effort that led to the discovery and resolution of several bugs, culminating in a successful launch on multiple platforms.

AI-Powered Acceleration (May-Jun 2025)

In May 2025, the discovery of Cursor AI allowed for the rapid implementation of three key features: a smarter caching service that improved smoothness by 2-3 times, selectable magnifier interpolation, and quick image preview using the keyboard. The project's structure also became much more multi-layered and less coupled after a two-day refactoring session with Gemini. In June, with Gemini's assistance again, the entire UI was ported to qfluentwidgets for a modern aesthetic.

Architectural Maturity (Jul-Aug 2025)

July saw a major overhaul of the rendering pipeline and the launcher script, but also highlighted persistent bugs related to race conditions, confirming the need for a more robust architecture. This led to the monumental rewrite in August 2025. The qfluentwidgets library was replaced with 100% custom components, and the entire application was migrated to a proper Model-View-Presenter (MVP) architecture. This new, solid foundation resolved numerous underlying issues and paved the way for more stable and ambitious future development.