Simon Last
Co-founder, Notion. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderengineerexecutive@simonlast ↗LinkedIn ↗simonlast.org ↗
Simon Last co-founded the productivity and workspace platform Notion alongside Ivan Zhao in 2013, contributing heavily to its early code and interface design. Today, he leads Notion’s AI architecture and engineering teams, driving the platform's evolution into agentic workflows, custom AI agents, and semantic retrieval systems.
2shows
2appearances
37statements
2resolved
2supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
8said about them ↓ Everything Simon Last said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Simon Last Argues That Coding Agents Are the Kernel of AGI
“I think one thing that's becoming more clear is I think like coding agents are the kernel VGI, sort of everything is a coding agent.”
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…”
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.”
Simon Last: Companies Must Redesign AI Software Harnesses Every Six Months
“I think this is honestly a really key thing and something that a lot of companies get wrong is just like doing one thing and then just like sticking with it. You really do have to keenly aware of what the current state of the models and the technology is, and …”
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: AGI Will Essentially Be a Coding Agent
“I think of coding agents as, like, the kernel of AGI. AGI will be a coding agent.”
Simon Last: Notion Now Uses Cheaper Chinese Open-Source AI Models
“We actually just released one of them in our agent last week, and we're gonna do all four for sure. They're actually quite good, and they're way cheaper than the Frontier models.”
Claude Sonnet Was the Breakthrough That Unlocked Notion's Custom Agents
“The big unlock was Probably like Sonic 3.6 or seven early last year. And that's when we started working on our agent, which we shipped last year.”
Notion Custom Agents Use Standard Pages and Databases as Their Memory
“Another example of this is we have no built-in memory concept. Memory is, is just pages and databases. And so if you want to give it memory, just give it a page and give it access to that page.”
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: 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: Vector Embeddings Make Hierarchical Workspace Organization Irrelevant
“I would say, I mean, the interesting thing is that with embeddings, it almost doesn't matter as much anymore, The AI doesn't really care what the tree structure is, for example. The, all, all the AI cares about is that there's a snippet of text that has the co…”
Simon Last: Notion Is Now a Tool for Managing AI Agents
“Broadly speaking, before AI, our goal was to create the best tool for humans to directly perform their work. And then, now the goal is to create the best tool for humans to manage agents to do the work for them.”
Simon Last: Managing AI Agent Swarms Requires Kanban Boards, Not Chat
“If you're working with your swarm of, like, a hundred background coding agents. You don't want to have a hundred chat threads. You want a Kanban board. It's, you know, the same as before.”
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.”
Last: Coding agents allow software to bootstrap and debug itself
“The exciting thing about that is sort of your agent can sort of bootstrap its own software and capabilities and actually debug and maintain them.”
Notion's Design Team Builds Live Code Prototypes Instead of Static Mocks
“Our design team made a whole separate GitHub repo called the design playground. And it's basically just to create a bunch of like helper components and for quickly throwing together UIs and it's become like actually quite sophisticated. Like it has like an age…”
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.”
MCP Lacks a Trigger Protocol, Forcing Notion to Build Custom Trigger Infrastructure
“MCP is a really great way to gain access to tools. Works really well. But you just looked at the trigger UI, for example, there's no trigger protocol. And so those are things we had to build ourselves.”
Simon Last: Enterprise AI Retrieval Requires Source-Specific Tuning
“Like, you know, you can't just apply a one-size-fits-all to, like, querying Slack versus querying Google Drive, let's say. They're completely different kinds of information, and we found that there's just a little bit of, like craft and love that has to go int…”
The other half of the tape: Simon Last's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 8 times in 3 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ivan Zhao 3Sarah Guo 2Ankur Goyal 2Elad Gil 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
No Priors 7
Latent Space 1
2024 8 mentions in 3 episodes 3 per episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Simon's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| NO PRIORSLEDGER | Co-founder, Notion | 1 | 19 | — | full record on No Priors → |
| LATENT SPACELEDGER | Co-founder, Notion | 1 | 18 | 100% 2/2 | full record on Latent Space → |