From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last

Notion isn’t designing AI agents that just use tools. Their agents can autonomously build their own integrations, as well as write the code needed to finish a task. Sarah Guo sits down with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last to explore Notion’s rapid evolution from a simple writing assistant to a sophisticated platform for custom AI agents. Simon discusses the technical hurdles of indexing disparate data from sources like Slack and Google Drive, as well as the internal shift toward using coding agents to build Notion itself. Plus, Simon elaborates on what he sees as a fundamental transition in productivity: moving from a tool where humans do the work, to one where humans manage a swarm of agents.

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Chapters:

00:00 – Cold Open

00:05 – Simon Last Introduction

00:26 – Genesis of Notion AI

04:10 – Challenge of Semantic Indexing and Retrieval

07:16 – The Six-Month Rewrite Cycle

08:12 – Notion’s Coding Agent Era

09:44 – Impact on Team Dynamics

12:49 – Launching Custom Agents

15:39 – Notion as the ‘Switzerland’ for Models

17:33 – Designing APIs for Agent Customers

20:09 – Simon’s Personal Agentic Workflows

24:48 – Notion: Tool for Work is Now A Tool for Agents

27:28 – How Building Has Changed for Simon

29:00 – Conclusion