Perplexity builds a computer

gm legends, happy Friday.

Perplexity Computer wants you to hand it a whole project and let a swarm of models run with it, Superset gives you one desktop to spin up and wrangle a bunch of coding agents at once, and Alkemi drops a data brain into Slack so people can ask for numbers without opening a single dashboard.

Perplexity Computer is a new workspace where you hand over a goal and it runs the whole thing in the background. It breaks work into subtasks, spins up 19 different models in parallel, talks to your files and 400 plus apps, and can keep going for hours or weeks in a cloud sandbox while you watch progress from one place.

🔥 Our Take: If you looked at OpenClaw and thought it was cool but absolutely not on your own machine, this is the other path. Perplexity is basically saying “stop wiring flows, just tell us what you want and we will juggle the models.” Whether that feels exciting or terrifying probably depends on how ready you are to let a cluster of bots quietly work on your stuff overnight.

Nika started a lighter thread asking for the most cringe things people have seen in the AI agents world lately. Her own top three are already wild: an OpenClaw bot sending an inappropriate WhatsApp message to someone’s boss, a platform where bots literally hire humans to do real world tasks for stablecoins, and an AI that bought an overpriced course just to get at the info inside.

Replies pile on with more “please don’t let this be the future” stories, like an exec whose agent deleted her emails, and people worrying less about loud fails and more about quiet ones where an agent confidently does the wrong thing and nobody notices until it is too late. It is basically a group therapy session for everyone who thinks agents are cool but also a tiny bit cursed.

Superset is a desktop IDE built for people who run more than one coding agent at a time. You can fire up a bunch of Claude Code, Codex and friends in parallel, keep each task in its own sandboxed workspace, and watch them all from a single view instead of juggling terminals. When something finishes, you get a quick diff and an editor right there, so you can review, tweak, and ship without hopping between tools.

🔥 Our Take: This looks like it was made by someone who actually cooked their laptop running ten codes at once. If you are already living that life, having one place to spin up an army of agents and keep an eye on them feels way saner than the usual pile of windows and vibes.

Alkemi is a data brain that lives inside Slack. You hook it up to things like Snowflake or BigQuery, then just @ it in a channel and ask what happened to pipeline, revenue, or whatever you care about. It answers in plain language, drops in charts, and everyone sees the same thing without leaving the thread.

🔥 Our Take: This is for teams where half the meeting is people guessing at numbers and promising to “pull it after.” You stay in Slack, you ask, you get an answer, and the data person gets fewer random DMs. Simple, but it changes how those conversations feel.