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

Hi, listeners. Welcome back to NoCriers. Today, I'm here with Simon Last, cofounder at Notion. We talk about their new vision for Notion in the AI age as a platform for humans and agents to collaborate, how the engineering and product org at Notion is changing, and these new tools for thought. Welcome, Simon. Hey, Simon. Thanks for doing this. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. It's really fun to be here. Notion's at scale, amazing platform, lots of users. You did start quite a while ago. I think of Notion as one of the companies that has really, like, braced AI quite aggressively. I was told you first got your hands on GPT four, at a company off-site in Mexico. Is that true? What is the origin story of, like, starting to work on this stuff? Yeah. I think yeah. That year, that was 2022. I I've been watching, you know, what's going on. In general, I've just been, like, super curious about the technology and fascinated to to try everything and think about, like, like, how we can apply it. It wasn't until I played with GPT four that it it became really, really real. So, you know, we and when we got access to it, it it was sort of like a a proto chat gbt like interface. And, my cofounder Ivan and I both a book on access, and it was just immediately clear, like, I would say two big things. One is that it was just pretty smart. It it it could follow reasonably complicated instructions. It could write things for you. It could edit things. And and the second big thing was that, of of the scope of its knowledge was extremely interesting. Super, super deep, like, and and broad world knowledge. When we play with it, it became just instantly clear to both of us. Like, okay, the the time is now to start, but we think about how to apply this, it's only gonna get better. We're talking about Mexico, GPT four. You guys saw it was, like, clearly the time. Did you start with, like, a particular vision of, like, what you should obviously be able to do with AI and Notion? Or just start pulling people from different teams or recruiting people and say, like, let's experiment? How did you begin? I think we immediately had a long term and a short term vision. I would say the the I'll start with the short term one. The the thing that was immediately obvious was, oh, it could be like a writing assistant. Mhmm. So it it could be in your document. You can, like, select some text, have it rewrite it. You can have it write text for you, maybe look something up, and then, you know, give you, like, like, sources or more information. So that was the thing that we immediately, like like, got to work on, and, you know, we sort of started a tiger team around it. And …