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

About this episode

Simon Last discusses Notion's evolution into a platform for custom AI agents and the shift in productivity dynamics.

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. Sign up for new podcasts every week. Email feedback to show@no-priors.com Follow us on Twitter: @NoPriorsPod | @Saranormous | @EladGil | @simonlast | @NotionHQ 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 –…

People in this episode

Host: Sarah Guo

Guest: Simon Last

Topics covered

• AI agents
• productivity
• coding
• team dynamics
• integrations
• technology evolution

Keywords

• Notion
• AI agents
• productivity
• coding agents
• integrations
• semantic indexing
• team dynamics

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Notion, Slack, Google Drive

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