Using search AI for coding

Just one-shotted version 1.0 of the landing page design for my PHP app. Perplexity AI’s sonar-pro LLM is surprisingly good, at both copywriting and design! What do you think?

I’ve always used Claude Sonnet for coding, but using a search-first AI for coding has some interesting pros and cons:

• Links to references and sources that I can double check for hallucination or recency, or to dive deeper to read more if I want to.
• I can provide ideas or rough references on the internet and ask it to search for them to do the coding task, whereas with Claude I needed to provide the direct links.
• The overall baseline for coding capability of LLMs seems pretty high now, that even a search AI can do a good enough job.
• It can’t index and read my entire codebase though, but I wonder if it’s possible to use OpenRouter API endpoint in Cursor itself… that would be next level! 🤔
• So far it had worked well for simple coding tasks, popular tech stacks like PHP and JavaScript. But probably not for niche software or bugs.
• Imagine a LLM equally good at coding (like Claude Code) and searching (like Perplexity’s)… I’d pay good money for that!

Been a fun ride so far building my next SaaS using a dark horse of a AI coding tool!