Sitting just a few ft away was Simon Final, considered one of Notion’s three cofounders. He’s gangly and shy, an engineer who has relinquished administration tasks to give attention to being a “tremendous IC”—a person contributor. He stood to shake my hand, and I awkwardly thanked him for letting me vibe-code. Simon returned to his laptop computer, the place he was monitoring an AI because it coded for him. Later, he would inform me that utilizing AI coding apps was like managing a bunch of interns.
Since 2022, the Notion app has had an AI assistant to assist customers draft their notes. Now the corporate is refashioning this as an “agent,” a sort of AI that may work autonomously within the background in your behalf when you deal with different duties. To drag this off, human engineers want to put in writing numerous code.
They open up Cursor and choose which of a number of AI fashions they’d wish to faucet into. Most engineers I chatted with throughout my go to most well-liked Claude, or they used the Claude Code app instantly. After selecting their fighter, the engineers ask their AI to draft code to construct a brand new factor or repair a characteristic. The human programmer then debugs and checks the output as wanted—although the AIs assist with this too—earlier than transferring the code to manufacturing.
At its foundational core, generative AI is enormously costly. The theoretical financial savings come within the forex of time, which is to say, if AI helped Notion’s cofounder and CEO Ivan Zhao end his duties sooner than anticipated, he may mosey right down to the jazz membership on the bottom flooring of his Market Road workplace constructing and bliss out for some time. Ivan likes jazz music. In actuality, he fills the time by working extra. The fantasy of the four-day workweek will stay simply that.
My workweek at Notion was simply two days, the final word code dash. (In alternate for full entry to their lair, I agreed to determine rank-and-file engineers by first identify solely.) My first project was to repair the best way a chart known as a mermaid diagram seems within the Notion app. Two engineers, Quinn and Modi, advised me that these diagrams exist as SVG information in Notion and, regardless of being known as scalable vector graphics, can’t be scaled up or zoomed into like a JPEG file. Because of this, the textual content inside mermaid diagrams on Notion is usually unreadable.
Quinn slid his laptop computer towards me. He had the Cursor app open and on the prepared, working Claude. For funsies, he scrolled via a part of Notion’s code base. “So, the Notion code base? Has a whole lot of information. You in all probability, whilst an engineer, wouldn’t even know the place to go,” he stated, politely referring to me as an engineer. “However we’re going to disregard all that. We’re simply going to ask the AI on the sidebar to try this.”
His vibe-coding technique, Quinn defined, was usually to ask the AI: Hey, why is that this factor the best way it’s? The query forces the AI to do a little bit of its personal analysis first, and the reply helps inform the immediate that we, the human engineers, would write. After “considering,” Cursor knowledgeable us, by way of streaming traces of textual content, that Notion’s mermaid diagrams are static photos that, amongst different issues, lack click on handlers and aren’t built-in with a full-screen infrastructure. Certain.
