Perplexity Is Quietly Building Its Own AI Coding Agent

Perplexity, valued at $20 billion, is building its own agentic coding tool that its engineers have been testing internally since May. The project, codenamed Teammate, was revealed by Business Insider journalist Charles Rollet, citing screenshots and a person familiar with the matter - the company itself declined to comment.

According to an internal description cited by Business Insider, Teammate was built "to work on a long horizon: managing projects, researching problems, and monitoring services." In practice, that means the tool isn't limited to suggesting lines of code in an editor - it's meant to independently run the entire engineering workflow, from flagging an issue to shipping a fix.

What Teammate Can Do

Among the tasks the tool is expected to handle on its own are hunting for bugs in Perplexity's internal systems and ongoing monitoring of production services. The key difference from competitors, according to Business Insider's sources, is that Teammate is model-agnostic - it isn't locked into a single language model provider the way some rivals have built their tools around one partner.

Pushing the engineering team toward heavy AI use is Perplexity's CTO, Denis Yarats. A few weeks before Teammate's internal rollout, he wrote to engineers that by the end of the year, and possibly sooner, they should "stop looking at code" and simply rely on AI.

By the end of the year, and maybe sooner, software engineers should stop looking at code - Denis Yarats, CTO of Perplexity

Responding to Quality Concerns

Yarats's approach has stirred controversy in an industry increasingly worried about "AI slop" - a flood of low-quality code generated without oversight by coding agents. Yarats pushes back directly, arguing the problem disappears as long as the generated code passes rigorous quality tests.

Slop is not going to be a thing - Denis Yarats, CTO of Perplexity

The Agentic Coding Race

If Perplexity decides to release Teammate publicly, it will join an increasingly crowded field of startups and giants competing for coding agents: Cursor, Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI's Codex and other tools are all vying to take over as much engineering work from humans as possible. Perplexity, known mainly for its AI-powered search engine, does have a strong asset though - its own infrastructure and experience building agentic products for millions of search users.

Business Insider notes that it remains unclear whether or when the product will reach the market. The report is based on a single source and screenshots of internal company communications, and Perplexity has not formally confirmed the project's existence beyond declining to comment.

What It Means for Developers

For Polish development teams tracking the agentic tools market, the signal is clear: another major player with deep pockets and its own cloud infrastructure is preparing to enter a segment that, until recently, was dominated by specialized startups like Cursor. Teammate's model-agnostic approach, if it actually reaches the market, could give companies flexibility that tools tied to a single model provider lack.

For now, though, Teammate remains an internal project, with Perplexity focused on testing it on its own codebase before - if ever - deciding to release it beyond the company's walls.

Sources: Perplexity is quietly building an AI coding tool to rival Cursor and Claude Code (thenextweb.com), Perplexity is building a secret weapon to join the AI coding wars (aol.com)