Research & analysis assistants Works alongside

# Perplexity helps teams understand why.
Mneme helps teams preserve what must remain true.

Perplexity Enterprise gives engineering teams cited, up-to-date answers about technology choices. Mneme takes those choices and makes them enforceable — turning research rationale into governance constraints every AI coding agent respects.

"Perplexity helps teams understand why. Mneme helps teams preserve what must remain true."

## Two tools, two jobs

These are not competing tools and there is no API handshake between them. They operate at different stages of the engineering decision cycle and solve genuinely different problems.

Perplexity Enterprise

#### Research & rationale

Cited answers to technology questions. Explore architectural options, compare libraries, understand tradeoffs. Output: insight with sources. Audience: the human making the decision.

Mneme HQ

#### Decision record & enforcement

Structured corpus of made decisions with precedence semantics. Governs every AI-generated diff downstream. Output: PASS / WARN / FAIL per-decision. Audience: every coding agent on the team.

The gap between them is where architectural drift lives. A team researches "should we use Redis or a JSON store?" in Perplexity, lands on an answer, and then that answer exists only in a Slack thread, a brain, or an ADR that no agent ever reads. The next time an agent touches the storage layer, it reaches its own conclusion — often the wrong one.

Mneme is the mechanism that closes that gap: take the decision the team arrived at after the research, record it as a structured constraint, and from that point forward every AI coding agent is bound by it.

## The research-to-enforcement workflow

This is the practical sequence. No API required — just a disciplined hand-off between the research stage and the governance stage.

01
Perplexity Enterprise
Ask the question that needs an answer: "What are the operational tradeoffs between Redis and a filesystem JSON store for a lightweight session cache in a containerised service?" Get cited, current answers. Evaluate. Make the call.
02
Mneme HQ — mneme add_decision
Record the decision as a structured constraint. Include the rationale from the research (a summary, a link, the key tradeoff). The decision is now in `project_memory.json` with a decision ID, status, and precedence rank.
03
Mneme HQ — Pre-generation hook
Every subsequent AI-generated diff touching the storage layer is evaluated against the recorded decision. Redis gets blocked. The JSON store approach gets through. The team's research becomes structural — not a suggestion the agent can ignore.
04
Claude Code · Cursor · GitHub Actions CI
Any agent on any tool operates within the constraint. The decision made via Perplexity research is now equally visible to a Claude Code hook at the editor layer and a GitHub Actions gate in CI — without being pasted into both.

## Why this pattern matters for AI-assisted teams

Teams using Perplexity Enterprise for architectural research are usually doing so because they have high AI coding adoption. They're generating code faster than they're reviewing it. Research quality improves the initial decision — but it doesn't govern the downstream agents that implement it.

The structural problem: a Perplexity answer is high-quality input to a human decision. But once the human moves on, the decision has no enforcement surface. The next agent — or the next human — has no deterministic way to know that the question was already answered and the answer is binding.

Mneme provides that enforcement surface. Once a decision is recorded in `project_memory.json`, every invocation of `mneme check` — whether from a Claude Code PreToolUse hook, a Cursor session, or a GitHub Actions gate — evaluates new code against it. The research rationale becomes architecture enforcement. Same input, structural output.

Scope note: This is a workflow pattern, not a native API integration. Mneme does not call Perplexity and Perplexity does not call Mneme. The integration is the discipline: research in Perplexity, record in Mneme, enforce everywhere. That handoff is where most teams currently lose their decisions.

## What this does not replace

Perplexity is a research tool with citations and search grounding. Mneme is a governance layer with precedence semantics and enforcement hooks. They don't substitute for each other:

- Mneme does not tell you which storage technology is better. It enforces the decision your team made after figuring that out.
- Perplexity does not enforce decisions. It surfaces rationale. You still have to record and govern the decision.
- Mneme's retrieval is deterministic keyword scoring — no fuzzy recall, no hallucination. What goes in comes back exactly as recorded.
- Perplexity's output is stochastic by design — that's what makes it useful for open research questions. It's the wrong tool for constraint enforcement.

## Where Perplexity Enterprise fits in the AI coding stack

Research assistants like Perplexity Enterprise are increasingly part of engineering workflows — used to evaluate libraries, explore security postures, assess migration paths, and audit emerging dependencies. As these tools become more capable, the decisions they inform multiply. Each one is a potential constraint that needs to be recorded and enforced.

Mneme sits one layer below: it doesn't help you research; it helps you make research decisions durable. For teams serious about AI-assisted engineering at scale, both are necessary. Research without enforcement creates well-informed drift. Enforcement without research creates brittle rules with no grounding.

For more on the governance layer that connects research-stage decisions to generation-time enforcement, see Memory Is Not Governance and Why AI Architectural Governance Needs Precedence Semantics.

← Back to integrations

### Record your next architectural decision

The fastest way to move from research to enforcement: run `mneme init`, add your first decision with `mneme add_decision`, and wire a hook. The research rationale lives in the corpus; the constraint is live from the first `mneme check`.

Get started on GitHub See the ADR compiler — how existing docs become live enforcement →