Simon Last
person on 6 shows · 18 statements across 4 episodes · said 19 times in 10 episodes since 2020
No Priors 7 
20VC 5 
the Official SaaStr Podcast 3 
Lenny's Podcast 2 
Latent Space 1 
the MAD Podcast 1
On the record as a speaker too: Simon Last across every show, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year, every show
tap a year for its mentions
No Priors 720VC 5the Official SaaStr Podcast 3Lenny's Podcast 2the MAD Podcast 1Latent Space 1
2024 9 mentions in 4 episodes 2 per episode
- No Priors Ep. 51 | With Notion CEO Ivan Zhao
- Production AI Engineering starts with Evals
- No Priors Ep. 85 | CEO of Braintrust Ankur Goyal
- Akshay Kothari: How Notion Has More Money Than Ever & Why Startup Fundraising is Broken | E1203 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2023 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2021 2 mentions in 1 episode
2020 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
- 20VC: Notion's Fundraise with Index: The Most Anticipated Deal in The Valley: How It Came To Be | The Future of Remote Work |How Notion Approach The Balance of Growth and Profitability
- 20VC: How Roam Research Analyse Product Design, Team-Building, The Future of Collaboration Tools & Applying Tesla Go-To-Market To Roam with Conor White-Sullivan, Founder & CEO @ Roam Research
- every mention in 2020, scene by scene →
every mention on every show, scene by scene, with the transcript →
18 statements about Simon Last, every show
Schoening: Human intervention in writing code should feel like a bug
“At least on the writing side, every time there is an intervention, a human intervention, it should feel a little bit like a bug.”
AI Evaluation Harnesses Should Remain Compatible With General CLI Tools
“Yeah, I think it'll be a mistake to like fix it on any particular coding agent. At the end of the day, it's just like CLI tools.”
Supervising AI Agents Is a Deeply Technical Systems Problem, Unlike Managing Humans
“There's a critical difference
To being a manager, which is that like, it is actually very deeply technical.
The problem of, you know, humans are very like fuzzy and you can't like treat a team of humans like a rigorous system where like, you know, PRs like fle…”
CLI Environments Let AI Agents Autonomously Debug and Fix Broken Tools
“And then I think the most important thing that's super cool is that there it's also inherently a bootstrapped. So if there's an issue of the agent can debug and fix itself within the same environment that it uses the tool, right?”
MCP Provides a Safer Permission Model Than CLIs by Preventing Token Exfiltration
“MCP inherently has a really strong permission model. Like, all you can do is call the tools. A CLI is a little bit murkier. It's like, can I access the API token? Are you, like, properly sort of, like, re-encrypting the token so it can't, like, exfiltrate it? …”
Agent Environments Must Favor Model Preferences Over Internal System Architecture
“I mean, that was, I would say that was a big learning is just, you know, really be savvy and really careful thinking about what the model wants in terms of, you know, its environment and cater around that and really try so hard not to expose it to any complexi…”
Simon Last Runs Autonomous Coding Agents Overnight Before Going to Sleep
“So now every night before I go to bed, I'm like, okay, did I start enough agents to get them done? I get everything done.”
Simon Last: 99% of Agent Failures Are Tool Bugs, Not Model Flaws
“And actually, 99% of the time, it's a bug in one of the tools. Right. And so, just fix the bug.”
Notion's Meeting Notes Automatically Mention Individuals Referenced in Generated Summaries
“One thing that the meeting notes team added recently that was But I've been blowing my mind is they, we have, they made it so it actually, when it makes the summary will actually mention the people that were referenced in it. So I now get notifications wheneve…”
Simon Last: GPT-4 Proto-Interface Sparked Notion's AI Pivot
“It wasn't until I played with GPT-IV that it became really, really real. So, you know, we, when we got access to it was sort of like a proto-ChatGPT-like interface. And my co-founder Ivan and I both got access, and it was just immediately clear, like, I would …”
Simon Last: Most Enterprise Software Companies Build Terrible Search Indexes
“But it turns out that most of the companies are pretty bad at making their indexes.”
Simon Last: AI Coding Agents Can Build More Robust Software
“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: Current AI Tools Enable 100x to 1,000x Engineering Leverage
“You can be like a hundred or thousand x engineer for using the tools right now. I think the gap is much bigger. Like the minimum bar has not changed, but the maximum bar has extremely increased.”
Simon Last: AI Agents Now Write All Pull Requests at Notion
“And you know, all the pull requests are now written by agents. They're often like larger and more complex. That's like the worst part. But the better part is that they're often like a much better tested and we can demand sort of a much better testing for the t…”
Simon Last Let an Autonomous Coding Agent Run for 13 Days
“My personal record is that I've had a coding agent running for, I think it was, 13 days straight without stopping. I'm just basically working through, like, tasks.”
Simon Last: Start Custom Enterprise AI Agents in Approval Mode
“The general pattern I follow is sort of, I build it as a prototype, I have it in sort of like an approval mode, where I'm sort of, you know, watching it closely, and then, but then after it runs a bunch of times, you kind of trust that it's working”
Notion Co-Founder Simon Last Has Not Manually Typed Code Since Summer
“I haven't written code since like last summer. I don't type code anymore.”