Perplexity could be the latest entrant into the heated AI coding wars.
The San Francisco-based AI search startup is building an in-house AI coding tool that could be made publicly available in the future, people familiar with the matter said.
For now, Perplexity has codenamed the tool “Teammate,” and its engineers have been using it since May, according to screenshots obtained by Business Insider.
It’s unclear exactly if or when Perplexity, which was valued at $20 billion in a funding round last year, will launch the product. If realized, Perplexity (originally focused on an AI-powered search engine to compete with Google) would move much closer to competing for supremacy with Cursor, Anthropic, and OpenAI, which have developed widely used AI-coding products.
Teammate is intended for supervising software from start to finish on the project, according to an internal announcement obtained by Business Insider.
“It’s built for long-term engineering work, including project ownership, problem investigation, and service monitoring,” the announcement reads.
A spokesperson for Perplexity declined to comment.
According to screenshots, Perplexity engineers task the tool with tasks such as finding bugs in internal systems.
The AI tool is model-agnostic, meaning it is not built on a specific chatbot, people familiar with the matter said.
Denis Yarats, chief technology officer at Perplexity, also encouraged the startup’s engineers to use AI in their coding.
Weeks before Teammate launched internally, the executive wrote in a message seen by Business Insider that by the end of the year or sooner, software engineers should “stop looking at code” and use only AI.
Yaratz also defended AI against accusations that it produces “sloppy” or low-quality code.
As long as the generated code passes quality checks, “slop is not a problem,” Yaratz wrote.
Any tips? Contact Charles via email. crolet@businessinsider.com or on Signal and WhatsApp 628-282-2811. Use a personal email address, non-work WiFi network, and non-work device. Here’s a guide to sharing your information securely.