Insight
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.”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Insight
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.”
Disclosure
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.”
Insight
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?”
Insight
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? …”
Insight
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…”
Insight
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
Opinion
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.”
Assertion Supported
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.”
Disclosure
Notion Rebuilt Its Agent Framework Four or Five Times Before Launch
“It's probably the fourth or fifth time that we rebuilt that.”
Disclosure
Notion Will Soon Release Direct Agent-to-Agent Invocation Settings
“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.”
Assertion Not publicly verifiable
Notion's Custom Agent Operates With Over 100 Distinct Internal Feature Tools
“So there's now like over a hundred tools just for all, all the crazy notion stuff.”
Assertion Supported
Notion Custom Agents Are Deployed With Zero Permissions by Default
“The thing about custom agents that is that by default, it has no permission to do anything. And then you have to explicitly granted all the permissions.”
Disclosure
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.”
Disclosure
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…”
