The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 19 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
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.”
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…”
Notion Now Advises Users to Dump Data Without Worrying About Organization
“And so actually, we kind of advise people now, like, don't worry as much about organization. Just find a way to get it all piped in and like thrown in there.”
Notion Built Custom Markdown and SQLite APIs Specifically for AI Agents
“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 d…”
Simon Last Let an Autonomous Coding Agent Run for 13 Days
“My personal record is that I've had a coding agent running for, I think it was, 13 days straight without stopping. I'm just basically working through, like, tasks.”
Simon Last: Start Custom Enterprise AI Agents in Approval Mode
“The general pattern I follow is sort of, I build it as a prototype, I have it in sort of like an approval mode, where I'm sort of, you know, watching it closely, and then, but then after it runs a bunch of times, you kind of trust that it's working”
Simon Last: Notion's HR Team Is Top Adopter of AI Agents
“The people team's been amazing. They're actually one of the highest adopters of custom agents.”
Simon Last: GPT-4 Proto-Interface Sparked Notion's AI Pivot
“It wasn't until I played with GPT-IV that it became really, really real. So, you know, we, when we got access to it was sort of like a proto-ChatGPT-like interface. And my co-founder Ivan and I both got access, and it was just immediately clear, like, I would …”