Spec-driven development: The AI engineering workflow at Notion | Ryan Nystrom

About this episode

Ryan Nystrom discusses the AI engineering workflow at Notion and the development of custom agents.

Ryan Nystrom is a software engineer at Notion. He joined in December 2024 after Notion acquired Campsite, the team communication platform he co-founded with Brian Lovin. At Notion, he’s been a core builder of Notion AI and the Custom Agents feature launched in February 2026. He manages a team of six to seven engineers while still writing code himself, currently running Project Afterburner, a push to cut Notion’s CI time to a quarter of its current duration. What you’ll learn: How to build a Notion AI custom agent that auto-generates your daily standup pre-read by pulling from Slack, GitHub, Honeycomb metrics, and yesterday’s meeting transcript How to configure subagents and MCP integrations within Notion AI How Notion’s internal “Boxy” system lets engineers @mention Codex from within Notion comments and get a full pull request with screenshots in 20 minutes The spec-first development workflow: dictate an idea into Whisper, have Codex format it as a proper spec, commit it to the repo, and let the agent implement and verify it autonomously Why fast CI is absolutely critical in the age of AI coding agents How to prompt AI coding agents to defend their reasoning under pushback Why…

People in this episode

Host: Claire Vo

Guest: Ryan Nystrom

Topics covered

• AI engineering workflow
• Notion AI
• software development
• custom agents
• continuous integration
• team communication
• engineering management

Keywords

• AI coding agents
• spec-driven development
• CI time reduction
• engineering managers
• subagents
• MCP integrations
• standup pre-read

Sponsors

WorkOS, Orkes

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Notion, Campsite

Products: Notion AI, Custom Agents, Whisper, Codex, Boxy

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