No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups From Coder to Manager: Navigating the Shift to Agentic Engineering with Notion Co-Founder Simon Last
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Mar 12, 2026 
Simon Last, Notion co-founder and AI/product leader, discusses Notion’s move from an AI writer to agentic engineering. He talks about indexing diverse data sources, building coding agents that write and deploy integrations, redesigning APIs for agents, and the shift from humans doing work to managing swarms of agents.
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How Notion Discovered AI At An Offsite
- Simon Last and Ivan tried GPT-4 at an offsite and immediately saw two clear possibilities: a writing assistant and a longer-term general assistant.
- They launched a writing assistant within months and pursued a multi-year effort to build a grounded general assistant that could manipulate databases and documents.
Indexing Is The Hard Part Of Grounded Q&A
- Notion progressed from an AI Writer to a semantic Q&A by building a real-time workspace index and grounding answers in sources.
- Indexing Slack, Google Drive, and constant evals made retrieval a multi-year engineering effort culminating in GA in October 2023.
Tune Retrieval For Each Data Source
- Tune retrieval per data source instead of applying one-size-fits-all; be empirical and iterate with real queries.
- Treat Slack, Google Drive, and Notion content as different information types and craft chunking and retrieval strategies for each.