How This AI Coding Secret Just Slashed Work From Four Days to One Hour—and What It Means for Your Business Hustle!

Ever wondered what happens when you force-feed your engineers a steady diet of AI coding tools? Well, at Perplexity, the AI search engine startup shaking up the scene, this is no hypothetical – it’s the real deal. CEO Aravind Srinivas didn’t just suggest using AI coding assistants like Cursor and GitHub Copilot; he mandated it. And the results? Mind-blowing. Cutting what used to take days of trial and error down to just an hour isn’t just efficiency – it’s a game-changer. The speed at which bugs vanish and features roll out has left even skeptics blinking twice. In an industry where every second counts, mandating AI isn’t just a tech upgrade; it’s a bold statement about where productivity is headed. But is this AI dependence foolproof, or does it come with its own bag of surprises? Strap in and dive into how Perplexity’s turbocharged approach is redefining coding—and why their meteoric growth, hitting 780 million queries last month alone, might just be the tip of the iceberg. LEARN MORE

AI search engine startup Perplexity internally mandated the use of AI coding tools — and says that its engineers have been noticeably more productive.

Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas told Y Combinator that the startup “made it compulsory” for its engineers to use AI coding tools such as Cursor or GitHub Copilot. These tools can generate blocks of code and debug programs.

Related: AI Is Already Writing About 30% of Code at Microsoft and Google. Here’s What It Means for Software Engineers.

Srinivas said that Perplexity engineers have seen measurable outcomes so far: Using the tools cuts down on “experimentation time” for new tasks from “three, four days to literally one hour,” he said.

“That level of change is incredible,” Srinivas stated. “The speed at which we can fix bugs and ship to production is crazy.”

Perplexity’s AI search engine reported a 20% month-over-month growth in May with 780 million queries.

^{Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images}

Related: Google’s CEO Is Spending His Free Time ‘Vibe Coding’ a Webpage with AI: ‘I’ve Just Been Messing Around’

At Bloomberg’s Tech Summit in May, Srinivas predicted that within a year, Perplexity would be handling “a billion queries a week.” He pointed out that when the AI search engine first got started in 2022, it processed 3,000 queries a day, advancing to 30 million queries a day by May.

“It’s been phenomenal growth,” Srinivas stated at the event.

Still, there “are issues,” Srinivas said about using AI coding assistants, noting that the tools can introduce new bugs that software engineers aren’t familiar with and don’t know how to fix.

Last week, Perplexity introduced Comet, an AI-powered web browser that takes on Google Search and Google Chrome. Comet uses Perplexity’s AI search engine as its default tool, putting the company’s core product front and center for users.

In May, Perplexity was reportedly in late-stage talks for a $500 million funding round that would value the company at $14 billion.

Related: ‘Building It Ourselves’: Morgan Stanley Created an AI Tool to Fix the Most Annoying Part of Coding. Here’s How It Works.

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