From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last - No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups Recap

Podcast: No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups

Published: 2026-03-12

Guests: Simon Last

What Happened

Simon Last, co-founder of Notion, discussed the company's vision in the AI age, focusing on collaboration between humans and agents. Notion aims to be a platform that facilitates such interactions, hoping to bridge the gap between manual work and automated assistance.

In February 2023, Notion launched an AI writing assistant as part of its short-term goals. This tool is a precursor to their long-term vision: a general assistant capable of database and document manipulation. By October 2023, Notion had further expanded its AI capabilities with a semantic index for QA, enhancing information retrieval from platforms like Slack and Google Drive.

Simon Last elaborated on the increasing importance of coding agents within Notion's engineering processes. These agents have not only increased the robustness of their product work but also widened the skill gap between average engineers and those adept at utilizing AI tools. Notion's engineering team rewrites its AI harness approximately every six months to keep pace with technological advancements.

The role of agents within Notion has evolved significantly, with agents now able to autonomously perform tasks such as filing and responding to Slack messages. This shift has transformed Notion from a tool for human productivity to a manager of agent-driven work.

Notion's design team introduced a 'design playground' for creating high-fidelity prototypes, fostering innovation and testing within the company. Simon Last's personal use of custom agents for tasks like email triage and internal feedback routing exemplifies the practical application of these tools.

Notion aims to provide users with access to the best models from various AI labs, rather than restricting them to a single provider. This approach aligns with the growing competitiveness of open-source models, which offer cost-effective alternatives to Frontier models.

Workshops and hackathons are conducted by Notion to empower non-technical teams to build and use agents effectively. Simon Last has transitioned from coding to designing end-to-end tasks, overseeing the work of agents as an outer verifier. This marks a significant professional shift from coder to agent manager.

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