No Priors: Artificial Intelligence | Technology | Startups · Conviction

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

·29 min

The starting point is plain enough. Simon says GPT-4 clicked after he used a proto-ChatGPT-style interface in 2022, shifting the question from curiosity to what Notion could actually build with it. The conversation stays close to the work. The host pushes past broad AI excitement and asks what changed inside Notion, where the model is humans and agents sharing the same workspace. Design gives the cleanest example. Instead of handing over static mocks, designers can build high-fidelity prototypes and send a URL, which makes product review feel more like reacting to something alive. Engineering gets noisier. Simon describes a stack where more work runs in parallel, pull requests get larger, and agent-written code raises the bar for review and testing. The risk discussion is practical, not abstract. The hard cases are data loss, dangerous parts of the product, and whether some code should stay off limits. Simon is not arguing for a free-for-all. Reviews still matter, but better agents can support stronger testing expectations, especially before risky changes ship. The management layer becomes intent. He separates casual prompting from careful delegation: define the change, spell out how it will be checked, and set the deployment guardrails. That changes the role. By the end, coding sounds more like designing end-to-end tasks, letting the agent work, then stepping in as the outside verifier when it drifts. The title is literal. Coder-to-manager means becoming an agent manager who watches, checks, and redirects instead of producing every implementation detail by hand. The open thread is where Notion's agents go next. Simon says earlier agent attempts arrived too soon, while the full Notion AI agent launched last fall and much of the original idea now works.

As heard by us

A practical look at how agents are changing Notion's engineering workflow.

Simon Last presents Notion's AI push as more than a slogan; it reads as a shift in how the company actually works. He traces the change back to a GPT-4 moment in 2022, then shows how it rippled through design and engineering.

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Why you'd press play

You want the coder-to-manager shift, grounded in how Notion says it is using AI.

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