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

Simon Last: I think the ambition of what I even consider building has gone up a lot. ... I would say the big shift there is that you can really push on getting these agents to end-to-end implement and verify and maintain stuff, but it requires pretty significant thought in terms of how you architect things and what is the verification loop. But the upshot is I think if you do it well, you can be much more ambitious about what you're building and also make it much more robust than you could have done with humans writing it. And then the flip side is if you do it badly, it's all slop.

Simon Last: I think of coding agents as like the kernel of AGI. AGI will be a coding agent. And code is just a really, really useful, a primitive for representing like deterministic logic. The thing that's really exciting about it, replying it to a knowledge work agent is that it can bootstrap a capability. You know, so yeah, like I said, if integration doesn't exist, it can build it. If it needs to, connect itself to a new data source, it can do that.

Simon Last: In terms of the labs, we see ourselves as kind of like the Switzerland for models. We think in our customers, they don't want to be locked into a certain labs model. They're always releasing new versions. Any given month, one is better than the other. So we want to be a place where basically you can easily get access to all the best models at any time, and you can easily switch around. ...we think of our role as sort of taking all the best models that we can, creating really high-quality state-of-the-art agent implementations where people can easily and conveniently get access to them, and then making sort of a collaborative workspace that is really good for humans and for the agents to coordinate on. I think it's something that's very needed in the world, and we're just trying to do it in a really tasteful, well-executed way.

Simon Last: We essentially have a new customer, which is the agent. At first, that was definitely a problem. So for example, like our API uses this crazy JSON format for blocks that by default is like crazy verbose and like horrible for the agent. But we basically took on that challenge and designed just really convenient APIs for the agent. We created sort of a markdown dialect that looks like the default normal markdown, but it's sort of enhanced with all the Notion blocks. And the models are really good at it. It works really well. So that's how it reads and writes the pages. And then for databases, we use a SQLite. So basically, it gets to speak in SQLite, which also works really well. So the default thing did not work really well, but then we just took that on as an engineering challenge. And I would say now we have extremely convenient APIs that the agents are really naturally good at.