Notion Built Custom Markdown and SQLite APIs Specifically for AI Agents
Simon Last · From Note-Taking App to AI Workspace: The Simon Last Interview · Mar 12, 2026 · at 18:36
Simon Last, co-founder of Notion, explains how Notion re-architected its APIs from verbose JSON to Markdown and SQLite to make them token-efficient and native for AI agents.
0:00 / 0:18exact quote · 18.9s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We created sort of a markdown dialect that looks like the default normal markdown, but it's sort of enhanced with All the notion blocks. And the models are really good at it. It works really well. So, so that's how it reads and writes the pages. And then for databases we use a SQLite.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Simon Last
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…”