Perplexity storms into AI programming, directly challenging Cursor

According to StatWatch Beating, the AI search company Perplexity is internally developing an AI programming tool called Teammate, aiming to challenge Cursor, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex.

Teammate has been available for internal use by Perplexity engineers since May, focusing on longer-cycle software engineering tasks, including project advancement, troubleshooting, service monitoring, and identifying internal system vulnerabilities. It adopts a model-agnostic design, not tied to a single underlying model, more resembling an engineering project agent rather than a typical code completion tool.

Perplexity CTO Denis Yarats has recently been advocating for engineers to use AI more for coding internally, stating that software engineers should "stop looking at code" by the end of the year or even earlier and directly use AI.