Sitting a number of ft away was Simon Final, one in every of Notion’s three cofounders. He’s gangly and shy, an engineer who has relinquished administration duties to deal with 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 kind of AI that can work autonomously within the background in your behalf when you deal with different duties. To tug this off, human engineers want to write down a number of 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 popular 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 function. 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 all the way down to the jazz membership on the bottom flooring of his Market Avenue 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 last word code dash. (In trade for full entry to their lair, I agreed to establish rank-and-file engineers by first title solely.) My first project was to repair the best way a chart referred to as a mermaid diagram seems within the Notion app. Two engineers, Quinn and Modi, instructed me that these diagrams exist as SVG recordsdata in Notion and, regardless of being referred to as scalable vector graphics, can’t be scaled up or zoomed into like a JPEG file. In consequence, the textual content inside mermaid diagrams on Notion is commonly unreadable.
Quinn slid his laptop computer towards me. He had the Cursor app open and on the prepared, operating Claude. For funsies, he scrolled by means of a part of Notion’s code base. “So, the Notion code base? Has a number of recordsdata. You most likely, at the same time as an engineer, wouldn’t even know the place to go,” he mentioned, 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 do this.”
His vibe-coding technique, Quinn defined, was typically 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 “pondering,” Cursor knowledgeable us, through streaming traces of textual content, that Notion’s mermaid diagrams are static pictures that, amongst different issues, lack click on handlers and aren’t built-in with a full-screen infrastructure. Certain.
