Perplexity Known Pitfalls

Overview

Real gotchas when integrating Perplexity Sonar API. Perplexity uses an OpenAI-compatible chat endpoint but performs live web searches -- a fundamentally different paradigm from standard LLM completions. These pitfalls come from treating it like a regular chatbot.

Prerequisites

• Perplexity API key configured
• Understanding of OpenAI-compatible chat API format

Pitfalls

1. Using It as a Generic Chatbot

Perplexity searches the web per request. Using it for tasks that don't need web search wastes money.