The AI search engine startup Perplexity has made the use of AI coding tools mandatory, claiming that these tools have significantly boosted their engineers’ productivity.

According to Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, speaking to Y Combinator, the company “required” its engineers to utilize AI coding tools like Cursor or GitHub Copilot. These tools are designed to generate code snippets and assist in program debugging.

Srinivas noted that Perplexity’s engineers have achieved tangible results with these tools, reducing the “experimentation time” for new tasks from “three or four days to just one hour,” he stated.

“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}

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.

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