Plunging Into Perplexity
A different facet of the world.
Conversations with a friend last weekend lead to Perplexity Pro For FREE! I got blocked on development duties by an unsigned NDA, so I had time Sunday night to start plumbing this new tool into my setup.
Let’s begin …
Attention Conservation Notice:
Another product eval kinda thing. I have been intrigued by Perplexity since I heard of its “RAG first” approach. This is for those of you who scored a free year with them …
Plumbing:
Worked right off the bat with Claude Desktop. This excites me, because Claude has a nice desktop app, while many of the others for Mac are Electron and their behavior leads a lot to be desired. I can’t run Perplexity on my main monitor - it won’t scale.
Claude was paying attention, I used Opus 4.5 output as part of Model Mayhem.
Antigravity on the other hand … we’re beta testing for Google. Neither of the other VSCode version install links work.
Nor does a manual edit of the MCP file for Antigravity. This whole area is just crazypants, I hope it gets cleaned up quickly, say right after they disable the slop dispenser in the editor.
The Perplexity client itself won’t resize to work on a 4k display, so it’s not going to get a lot of use here, which is sad, because other than the size matters issue, this looks really nice.
And given Perplexity’s primary use the first Connector to install was obvious. I may have to pull my Mac out of my desktop setup and go sit on the couch so I can explore properly. ff
Or maybe it’s going to live there to the left of my main display, showing the stuff I dig up using it on my iPad.
Conclusion:
We are wading through Claude Camp and it’s slow going because I’m loaded down with work. The next (and final) thing to happen there is that I’m going to take that package of Claude Skills, pick out something new that I want to learn to do, and have at it.
Once that is done, it’s on to this new tool, and I’m pretty sure it’s going to be Perplexity & Parabeagle together. And if I’m really feeling it, I will get some sort of Solr MCP server going, so we can get into that Disinfodrome content.
What a mad, mad, MAD world. It’s like finals week every day all day and Friday never comes. Even the mighty Nate B. Jones has admitted to feeling a little “breathless”. So you, constant reader, are also allowed to pant, if this all seems a bit much to you.