From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last

Notion co-founder Simon Last discusses how AI has fundamentally transformed Notion's vision and engineering culture. He traces the journey from launching an AI writing assistant in February 2023 to building full agentic capabilities, including a personal agent and newly launched custom agents that run autonomously in the background. Key insights include: Notion rewrites its AI harness every six months to keep pace with model progress; coding agents have dramatically raised individual engineer output and ambition; the design team now ships high-fidelity interactive prototypes using agents; and Notion redesigned its APIs specifically for agent consumption (using markdown dialects and SQLite for databases). Simon describes his personal shift from writing code to acting as an 'agent manager' — designing end-to-end tasks and verifying outputs rather than typing code. He also shares practical agent workflows like email triage and internal bug routing, both using an evolving memory pattern.