Notion

“And the reality is that if you look at Notion, Airby does the job of taking Notion and putting it in a structured way, but that's a way that is not really usable to actually make it available to models in a useful way. Because you get all the blocks, details, …”

“I think the no-code tinkerers is the community. Yeah. It is going to be the same sort of community as what, yeah, Webflow, Zapier, Airtable, Notion, to some extent.”

“Within augment, we have we have both MCP support for complete extensibility of tools, but we, we've also built in a few first party integrations and serve them as tools to the agent. So we have GitHub linear notion that, that we use internally, and then we hav…”

“Everyone expects these you know, agentic systems to perform at the level of a human, right? Because that's what they're always going to compare them to. But in a lot of cases, they'll have these agents just in the IDE. And that's like the equivalent of onboard…”

“You can run Turbo Puffer either in SAS, right? That's what cursor does. You can run it in a single tenant cluster. So it's just you. That's what Notion does. And then you can run it in, in, in BYOC where everything is inside the customer's VPC. That's what, fo…”

“This workload still runs on GCP for what it's worth, right? Because it's so, it was just, it was so reliable. So it was never about moving off GCP.”

“It started getting really painful in like mid-twenty-twenty-four, because we were closing deals with Notion actually, that was running in AWS, and we're like, trust us, you really want us to run this in GCP? And they were like, no, I don't know about that, lik…”

“Notion does a ridiculous amount of queries in every round trip, just because they can. And I'm also now, when I use the cursor agent, I also see them doing more concurrency than I've ever seen before.”

“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.”

“I actually think the failure of our team is when we focus too much on what are tools that are cool tools. I actually think that's when we make have the least velocity because you still need some sort of focus on a user journey.”

“Datadog could not exist without cloud storage, right? That it's kind of fundamental that that works. And AWS has like a cloud watch product, but Datadog is an expert on understanding how people want observability on the products they launch. And we're experts …”

“It's probably the fourth or fifth time that we rebuilt that.”

“And actually, 99% of the time, it's a bug in one of the tools. Right. And so, just fix the bug.”

“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.”

“Before function calling came out, we were trying to fine tune with the frontier labs and with fireworks, like a function calling model on notion functions.”

“We'll all sit down every Friday and look at the P. 99 of like the most token exhaustive custom agent transcript and just look at why it didn't do well and cut a bunch of tasks.”

“Like they have shipped models that were not the snapshots that we wanted, and they have changed the snapshots that they shipped based on the feedback that we give, because our feedback tends to be more enterprise work focused and not coding agent focused.”

“So there's now like over a hundred tools just for all, all the crazy notion stuff.”

“Is really what will set notion apart for every new capability is we have like two skills that are crucial when it comes to frontier capabilities. One is not letting yourself swim upstream. So like quickly realizing if you're just pressing against model capabil…”

“So I think it's actually not released yet. Releasing it like next week is in the settings for an agent, you can give it access to invoke any other agent. So you can have them just talk directly.”

“The database autofill feature will soon be agentic. That will be associated with usage based pricing”

“We've definitely noticed, particularly for some providers that things are slower during working hours.”

“And then what we have, what we call Frontier Headroom evals, where we actively want to be at 30% pass rate. And that's actually been a effort that we took in partnership with Anthropic and OpenAI in the past maybe two or three months, because we actually hit a…”

“I manage, ah, the team that's what we'll call like core AI capabilities and infrastructure. That's about 50 people. But then we have, I partner teams that do packaging, so how it shows up in the corner chat versus custom agents versus meeting notes, that's ano…”

“There are a lot of things where we choose not to use MCP because we want to add more high touch to quality. I think search and agentic find is like the largest instance of that, where we have slack and linear and JIRA search and notion that is not using necess…”

“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…”

“We don't spend a lot of time trying to optimize what vector embedding we use anymore. That was a period of time, but that's just not the right level of optimization, right?”

“Obviously we should build product of self-healing. That's next on our roadmap.”

“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…”

“And so, we have, like, very firm conviction And we have had for a number of years now that that is its own career path, and we have always welcomed the misfits, so to speak. So we really firmly believe that you don't need an engineering background to be the be…”

“I think it's put a big pressure point on us to have really strong product conviction, because if anything can be demoed, You really need a strong filter of making sure that if, you know, you're doing X amount of work, you're making the, you're focusing on one …”

“Sonic couldn't handle two tools with the same name in OpenAI, GPT, 5.2. It was like, ah, I can figure this out. So that was an interesting one that we learned by accident through a SEV.”

“We're at a point right now in our business and enterprise or AI enabled plans where the search load and the search traffic, a majority of it's coming from agents, not humans.”

“Every software engineer in Notion this summer went through like this sheer one of our engineering leads at the company called it like, every software engineer is going through the identity crisis that every manager goes through, where all of a sudden they real…”

“And so if we can have our agents properly execute code that calls on CLI deterministically, it's a one time cost, right? Versus constantly having a language model integrate with an MCP over and over and over and paying those like repeated token fees.”

“There are certain aspects of Notion where we do fine tune and do reinforce and fine tuning on our own capabilities. But that's not necessarily trained on user data. You don't need that, that much data in the first place.”

“Companies that say they're selling the same model through different vendors, whether it be through first party or Bedrock, Azure, et cetera, we do see different qualities sometimes, and that's not necessarily what's advertised.”

“It's not Opus, that's for sure, because a majority of the tasks people are doing aren't Opus level intelligence.”

“One of our biggest use cases is bug triaging. So if someone posts something in Slack and you just have a custom agent that lives there that has its own routing constitution of what team this belongs to. Creates a task in your task database and then posts in th…”

“Positional ranking matters less, but top care retrieval mode matters more.”

“It would actually really slow us down to have a model that was fine tuned on our tools because we'd have to retrain it and cut a new model every time we did that.”

“When we went away from few shots to describing the goal of the tool and like goal driven, basically moving from a DAG to like a true system with feedback, that's when we could distribute tool ownership to the teams much better.”

“Everyone's clustered in capability, where everyone's clustered, I mean, Haiku's not that much cheaper. No one's really in the middle. Like, people really tend to cluster around two. Like, this is really capable, and it's really fast, but it's really expensive,…”

“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.”

“So we will always support our MCP insofar as other people are using MCPs, right?”

“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…”

“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…”

“It was our most successful launch in terms of free trials and converting people and things like that.”

“We maintain the eval framework. Every team owns their own evals and a lot of them we've integrated to opt into CI or we run them nightly and we have a team, a custom agent that triggers to a team to look at the major failures.”

“I'd actually say we don't try and make it as easy as possible to use because the more we do that, the more we abstract away that interpretability that Simon's talking about that basically nerfs the model or nerfs the agent from being super capable.”