Perplexity Planning
Getting ready for 2026Q1
Did you Get Your Free Perplexity?
Assuming you’ve got that, there are some other things we’re going to plug into it over first quarter of this coming year. This is all for the sake of situational awareness and deep research. Let’s take a look at some of those things in advance.
Attention Conservation Notice:
Prep for our growth path in the new year. If you’re getting your learn on, come on in …
Summary:
Here are the things that I think are going to matter.
Notion - I gave Jira the boot a while ago and I have another self-hosted Kanban setup that’s not going to thrive. I kept hearing about Notion, then Nate B. Jones named it as a key tool, and after a quick look I see why. This is your research team environment.
Exa - I just wandered into this AI friendly search system on Saturday, immediately started plumbing it into all the things, and yes there is an Exa MCP server.
Parabeagle - my fork of Chroma, built for handling court cases and compartmentalized intel projects.
Inoreader - I put everything into Inoreader, I’ve got half a dozen active accounts, they’re compartments for various situations I’ve had to observe over the last few years. I am NOT happy with how things are with MCP RSS handling, maybe this extension will help. Emphasis: MAYBE.
Solr7-MCP - maybe this is going to be useful in combination with Open Semantic Search. This might be a Neal only thing. If only Parabeagle had OCR capability.
Exa MCP Server:
This is SLOP - what the Claude Desktop client told me about Exa after I connected it. I could rewrite it, but this is concise and shows the system in action.
The Exa MCP server gives you access to several powerful AI-powered search and research capabilities:
Web Search & Content Extraction
Real-time web search with configurable depth (auto/fast/deep modes) and result counts
Direct URL crawling to extract full content and metadata from specific pages
Supports both fallback and preferred livecrawl modes for getting the freshest content
Specialized Research Tools
Company research: Comprehensive information about businesses - operations, news, financials, industry analysis
LinkedIn search: Find professional profiles and company pages for networking or recruitment
Code context search: High-quality, fresh context for programming libraries, SDKs, and APIs (particularly useful for documentation and examples)
Deep Research Agent The standout feature is the deep researcher, which launches an AI agent that:
Performs extensive multi-source web searches
Crawls and analyzes relevant pages
Synthesizes findings into detailed research reports
Comes in two flavors: standard (15-45 seconds, good for most queries) and pro (45 seconds-2 minutes, for complex topics)
Notion:
Looks a bit like Google’s Workspace, eh?
And they have a desktop mail app that overlays Gmail.
Conclusion:
I have been pleased with my move to Antigravity but overall I am NOT happy with situational awareness OR deep research. Both of these areas are better than they were, thanks to Perplexity, but I want the same improvement in productivity there that I received by changing development environments.
There’s a deeper issue simmering here, one of maintainability. This is a … it’s a temperament problem for me. I know I will run off and play with all the new toys, but coming back with one that I will use every day is not such a common event. The winners from 2025 include Claude Desktop, MCP in general, Claude Code, Antigravity, and finally Perplexity.
The challenge I face for 2026?
Find the sweet spot
where I can both orchestrate
and maintain the stuff I build.
