[DigitalToday reporter Yoonseo Lee] Perplexity is running an in-house artificial intelligence coding tool as it tests the waters for entering the developer tools market.

Business Insider reported on July 7 that Perplexity is building and trial-running an internal AI coding tool under the codename "Teammate".

The company has not decided whether or when to release the tool externally. If it is made public, Perplexity, known as an AI search engine company, would broaden its business focus to developer productivity tools. That would also increase its overlap with the AI coding market, where Cursor, Anthropic and OpenAI are already competing.

Perplexity engineers have used Teammate since May, the report said. Screens obtained show it being used for tasks such as finding bugs in internal systems. A key feature is its focus on managing software projects overall rather than simple code generation.

An internal notice also reflects that direction. It said Teammate is designed to supervise software projects from start to finish. It added, "It was built for long-term engineering work, takes ownership of projects, investigates issues and monitors services."

Its technical architecture is also said not to be tied to a specific chatbot. The tool is not built on a single model, but instead adopts a model-agnostic structure that can use multiple models. Perplexity appears to be seeking to expand coding assistance while reducing dependence on any particular AI model.

The internal mood is also leaning toward broader use of AI. Dennis Yarats (데니스 야라츠), Perplexity's chief technology officer, has urged engineers to actively use AI for coding. He said a few weeks before Teammate was introduced internally, "By the end of the year, or even sooner, software engineers should stop looking at code and just use AI itself."

Yarats also pushed back on criticism that AI produces low-quality code. "As long as generated code passes quality checks, low-quality code will not be a problem," he said. This suggests he sees the effectiveness of AI coding tools in combining code generation with verification systems rather than focusing on generation alone.

Perplexity was valued at $20 billion in an investment round last year. It has focused on AI search services competing with Google, but this internal tool development shows the company reaching into a broader AI software area. With AI coding tools seen as a market with higher usage frequency and tighter workflow integration than search-type AI, attention is on whether a future release leads to a shift in Perplexity's product strategy.

For now, it remains at the stage of internal use at Perplexity, but whether Teammate is released has emerged as a factor in gauging whether Perplexity can expand from a search-focused company into a developer platform rival.