Perplexity Clone

Overview

A Perplexity-inspired answer engine: ask a question and get web-grounded answers with citations and threaded follow-ups.

What I built

A full-stack monorepo:

• Backend: a NestJS modular monolith (TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Prisma) that owns the API, persistence, Tavily web-search integration, and provider-agnostic answer generation (OpenAI or Groq).
• Frontend: a Next.js + Tailwind responsive two-column thread UI with custom markdown parsing that renders citation badges.
• Docker Compose shapes a production-like local environment, and a separate deployment guide covers migrations, secrets, networking, and verification.

Challenges

V2 is deliberately single-user and local: no auth, no user-scoped data, no rate limits, and no multi-tenant guardrails; those are tracked as later productization work. That explicit scoping is itself an engineering decision.

Outcomes

Live demo reachable; listed on the approved master resume. No production/commercial claims are made.

Narrative sources: docs/research/featured-project-research.md §2 + evidence ledger CL-13. Honest V2-scope framing kept.