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Notion

Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Notion)

Why cultivating agency matters more than cultivating skills in the AI era | Max Schoening (Notion)

Max Schoening, Head of Product at Notion, discusses how AI is reshaping software development. He argues that agency—the drive to effect change—is now more critical than specific skills, as AI makes the first 10% of any project 'free'. Schoening introduces his 'tiny core' theory for great products, debates the 'SaaSpocalypse', and emphasizes the growing importance of software quality and taste in an era of exploding software quantity.

The Future of Search: Agents, RAG, and Why Retrieval Still Matters — Simon Eskildsen, Turbopuffer

The Future of Search: Agents, RAG, and Why Retrieval Still Matters — Simon Eskildsen, Turbopuffer

Simon Hørup Eskildsen, founder of turbopuffer, shares his journey from scaling Shopify's infrastructure to creating a new search engine for the AI era. He discusses how a prohibitively expensive experiment at Readwise inspired him to build a cost-effective vector search solution based on object storage and NVMe. Eskildsen breaks down turbopuffer's architecture, its role in cutting costs for companies like Cursor and Notion, his philosophy on building a 'P99' engineering team, and how agentic workloads are changing the future of retrieval.

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

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

Notion's Co-Founder, Simon Last, discusses their evolution from a writing assistant to a platform for custom AI agents. He covers the technical hurdles of semantic indexing, the internal shift toward using coding agents to build Notion, and the fundamental transition from a tool where humans do the work to one where humans manage a swarm of agents.