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

Notion's co-founder, Simon Last, discusses Notion's AI-driven evolution into a platform where humans manage AI agents to perform work. Last shares that after experimenting with GPT-4 in early 2022, Notion aggressively embraced AI, initially as a writing assistant and later as a general assistant capable of creating and manipulating databases. He emphasizes the importance of frequent rewrites of their AI harness to align with the latest model advancements, noting that coding agents have dramatically increased individual engineering impact. Notion's agents can now bootstrap their capabilities, even building new integrations, and the company is focused on creating a collaborative workspace where humans and agents can effectively coordinate. Last also highlights his personal use of custom agents for email triage and internal feedback routing.