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Agent Environments Must Favor Model Preferences Over Internal System Architecture

Simon Last · Notion’s Sarah Sachs & Simon Last on Custom Agents, Evals, and the Future of Work · Apr 15, 2026 · at 51:22

Simon Last, co-founder of Notion, discusses the engineering lessons learned from evolving Notion's agent architecture from proprietary XML formats to standard Markdown and SQLite interfaces.

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“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 complexity about your system that that's unnecessary.”

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