Perplexity may soon expand beyond AI search and enter the AI coding race. The company is reportedly working on a new AI coding tool that could compete with Claude Code and OpenAI’s coding assistants. According to Business Insider, the tool is currently being tested inside the company. It has been given the codename “Teammate,” and Perplexity engineers have been using it since May. There is no official word yet on whether the company plans to launch it publicly.
Teammate is designed to handle complete software projects. According to an internal announcement seen by Business Insider, the tool can manage engineering work from start to finish. “It’s built for long-horizon engineering work: owning projects, investigating issues, and monitoring services,” the announcement reads.
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Engineers at Perplexity have already been using the AI tool for tasks such as finding bugs in the company’s internal systems. The report also says that Teammate is model-agnostic. This means it is not tied to a single AI model or chatbot.
Perplexity’s Chief Technology Officer, Denis Yarats, has reportedly encouraged engineers to rely more on AI while writing software. A few weeks before Teammate was introduced internally, Yarats shared messages saying that by the end of the year, or even sooner, software engineers should “stop looking at code” and just use AI.
Yarats also defended the concerns that AI-generated code can sometimes be low quality. “Slop is not going to be a thing” as long as the code it generates passes quality checks, Yarats wrote.
Perplexity has not officially announced Teammate or confirmed plans for a public release. However, if the company launches the tool, it would mark a major step beyond its AI search business. It would also put Perplexity in direct competition with companies that are expanding their AI coding platforms.
Meanwhile, Perplexity reportedly plans to use Nvidia’s new central processing units (CPUs). “Perplexity tested Vera on the agentic work it runs every day. Running a real coding workflow — cloning a repository and running its test suite in sandboxes — Vera completed the job about 1.5x faster than x86, and started concurrent sandboxes up to 1.9x faster. Perplexity is now looking to deploy Vera in its upcoming production system,” Nvidia said.