I Built a Web Search Agent Harness. Then I Checked If It Actually Deserved the Name.

I Built a Web Search Agent Harness. Then I Checked If It Actually Deserved the Name.

Part 1 of my agent build series

Let me set the scene.

I wanted a Perplexity-style search assistant — type a question, watch it decide to go search the web mid-answer, get back a real answer with numbered citations you can click. Not a chatbot wearing a search icon. Something that actually reasons about whether it needs to look something up before it does.

So I built it. Bun backend, React 19 frontend, Tavily for search, OpenRouter for the model, Postgres underneath. A few weeks in, it worked. Streaming answers, clickable sources, follow-up questions, the whole thing.