Spec-driven development: The AI engineering workflow at Notion | Ryan Nystrom

Ryan Nystrom is a software engineer at Notion. He joined in December 2024 after Notion acquired Campsite, the team communication platform he co-founded with Brian Lovin. At Notion, he’s been a core builder of Notion AI and the Custom Agents feature launched in February 2026. He manages a team of six to seven engineers while still writing code himself, currently running Project Afterburner, a push to cut Notion’s CI time to a quarter of its current duration. What you’ll learn: How to build a Notion AI custom agent that auto-generates your daily standup pre-read by pulling from Slack, GitHub, Honeycomb metrics, and yesterday’s meeting transcriptHow to configure subagents and MCP integrations within Notion AIHow Notion’s internal “Boxy” system lets engineers @mention Codex from within Notion comments and get a full pull request with screenshots in 20 minutesThe spec-first development workflow: dictate an idea into Whisper, have Codex format it as a proper spec, commit it to the repo, and let the agent implement and verify it autonomouslyWhy fast CI is absolutely critical in the age of AI coding agentsHow to prompt AI coding agents to defend their reasoning under pushbackWhy engineering managers and even senior executives should keep writing code— Brought to you by: WorkOS https://workos.com/?utm_source=lennys_howiai&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=q22025—Make your app enterprise-ready today Orkes https://www.orkes.io/—The enterprise platform for reliable applications and agentic workflows — In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Introduction to Ryan Nystrom (02:48) How AI has upended 12+ years of the same working routine (04:30) Project Afterburner: Notion’s push to cut CI time to a quarter (09:00) Why high-frequency, high-quality meetings beat lower-frequency standups (11:10) How automated context surfaces every engineer’s work equally (12:15) Why cutting meeting prep is a burnout protection mechanism (14:26) The case for engineering managers writing code (16:13) Inside “Boxy”: Notion’s internal VM-based background agent system (20:30) Old World vs. New World code review (24:51) Prompting Codex from Notion comments (29:20) The emotions around code review (31:01) Quick recap (32:00) Spec-first development: writing and checking agent specs into the repo (35:10) The spec as changelog: version control for how a feature actually works (37:53) How engineers’ roles are evolving (39:00) Lightning round (45:21) Where to find Ryan — Tools referenced: • Notion AI: https://www.notion.com/product/ai • Notion Custom Agents: https://www.notion.com/blog/introducing-custom-agents • Codex (OpenAI): https://openai.com/codex • Claude Code (Anthropic): https://claude.ai/code • Honeycomb (observability + MCP): https://www.honeycomb.io https://www.honeycomb.io/ • Whisper (OpenAI voice transcription): https://openai.com/research/whisper • Slack: https://slack.com https://slack.com/ • GitHub: https://github.com https://github.com/ — Other references: • How Stripe built “minions”—AI coding agents that ship 1,300 PRs weekly from Slack reactions | Steve Kaliski (Stripe): https://www.chatprd.ai/how-i-ai/stripes-ai-minions-ship-1300-prs-weekly-from-a-slack-emoji • Notion 3.3 Custom Agents launch (February 24, 2026): https://www.notion.com/releases/2026-02-24 — Where to find Ryan Nystrom: X: https://x.com/ryannystrom LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryannystrom/ GitHub: https://github.com/rnystrom — Where to find Claire Vo: ChatPRD: https://www.chatprd.ai/ Website: https://clairevo.com/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/clairevo/ X: https://x.com/clairevo — Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email [email protected].

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  One line that I've been putting in my prompts lately is, I literally don't know what I'm doing here. You gotta explain it like I'm a five-year-old. I didn't start with writing code. I didn't start with anything. I just started with an empty markdown document. I actually just opened up Whisper and just started yapping about how this feature should work. I gave the yap session to Codex and was like, "Write a spec." I then opened up Codex again, pointed it at this spec file, and I said, "Build it." And basically one-shot it this.

• 0:27Claire Vo?

  I've been in software engineering for 20-plus years. We were writing these documents and we were sitting in meetings with other engineers debating the merits of one implementation versus another. And now, no more waiting for the meeting, no more waiting for review.

• 0:41Speaker 00

  I'm not a CI expert, but I kind of know what I want. And so, other folks were kind of like, "Can you just bring some of your puppy-dog energy to CI and just see what we can do?"

• 0:53Claire Vo?

  Your AI, your agent, is never going to complain when you ask it to do this five minutes before the meeting starts.

• 0:58Speaker 00

  It is more relaxing and it's more fun and I feel like I'm getting more done. It's weird to have this win-win-win.

• 1:04Claire Vo?

  They do the triangle and they're like, "Pick two," and you're like, "No, I want to pick all three."

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Give me the whole triangle.

• 1:08Claire Vo?

  Give me the whole triangle.

• 1:13Claire Vo?

  Welcome back to How I AI. I'm Claire Vow, product leader and AI obsessive here on a mission to help you build better with these new tools. Today, we have Ryan Neistrom from Notion and he's going to show us as an engineering manager how you can never prep for a stand-up again. We're also going to see how you can get a background agent to write code for a fix your friend texted you and how spec-driven development really works in a codebase at scale. Let's get to it. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. AI has already changed how we work. Tools are helping teams write better code, analyze customer data, and even handle support tickets automatically. But there's a catch. These tools only work well when they have deep access to company systems.

• 1:57Claire Vo?

  Your copilot needs to see your entire codebase. Your chatbot needs to search across internal docs. And for enterprise buyers, that raises serious security concerns. That's why these apps face intense IT scrutiny from day one. To pass, they need secure authentication, access controls, audit logs, the whole suite of enterprise features. Building all that from scratch, it's a massive lift. That's where WorkOS comes in. WorkOS gives you drop-in APIs for enterprise features so your app can become enterprise-ready and scale up market faster. Think of it like Stripe for enterprise features. OpenAI, Perplexity, and Cursor are already using WorkOS to move faster and meet enterprise demands.

• 2:42Claire Vo?

  Join them and hundreds of other industry leaders at workos.com. Start building today. Ryan, welcome to How I AI. I am really excited because you're going to show us, I think, start, medium, advanced mode on some AI coding stuff. And so before we jump in, how has AI just changed how you live your life at work?

• 3:11Speaker 00

  I mean, it's, it has completely upended the way I work. Like, I've been doing this, I did a lot of like, mobile iOS work in my past. And I worked the same way every day for like 12-plus years. And then the last year, I have changed IDEs, terminals, tools, like whatever, like 10-plus times. So it's like really weird and scary to be like changing this stuff so much. But it's also, I feel that like, I've been doing this for a while and I'm feeling like so much like joy and freshness and like newness in this that like, I wake up every day super excited to like tinker and build things.

• 3:55Speaker 00

  And I'm also like working faster and harder than I feel like I ever have, but like in a, in a good way. I know people are like, kind of freaked out about like, ah, everything's changing, the pace is up, but like, it's, it's really energizing for me.

• 4:08Claire Vo?

  Well, you are not alone. I think every How I AI guest has come on and said, I'm having more fun, I'm working faster and everything is different. And what I love about what you're going to show us is, it's not just the set of tools, which I think has changed, or how we write code has changed. How you like run a team has changed. So, and I think for the better, you know? So I would love to see how you're using Notion AI to actually run teams differently.

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, so for context, I manage a team of like six, seven people. I'm like an engineering manager, technical engineering tech lead manager, or whatever we call it. I manage people and I write code is like my role, which I love. And I've run a bunch of different projects here at Notion. The one I'm going to show today, we've nicknamed Afterburner. Like, kind of a quick backstory is I've been kind of vocal about our DevX CI for a while. I've just, I've worked at places where it's really slow. I've worked at places where it's really fast. And I came here and I was like, we're kind of like in between, but I feel like we're like slower than we need to be.

• 5:22Speaker 00

  And eventually this like caught up to me and somebody was like, could you just come fix it? And like, come work on it. And I'm not like an infra expert, I'm not a CI expert, but I kind of know what I want. And I think also, most importantly, the group that I manage and the org that I work in, we're a little notorious for being like really fast and like very, very AI-pilled. And so other folks were kind of like, can you just bring some of your like puppy dog energy to like CI? And just like see what we can do? And that's what we've, that's what we've done. So we had this really aggressive goal to cut our CI into like a quarter of what it is. We're on the path to doing that.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  But so what I want to show you is a little bit about how we run projects in Notion and how I'm using AI to kind of streamline those projects. So what we're looking at here is like our like project hub called Afterburner. And so in here, I've got all this documentation, I've got databases. We'll look at some meetings. I have like an automation that looks for any sort of like little wins if we knock off seconds from different jobs or whatever, and we keep it, we keep track of them in here.

• 6:38Speaker 00

  But what I want to show you is basically how we run our meetings. Our small group, we'd run a stand up every single day. And doing stand ups where everyone just like is kind of like dead eyed and going around being like, I did this, I shipped this change, or you know, no updates for me, thanks, is like painful. And in my opinion, like a huge waste of time. I want to like get to the meat. So we have this kind of like automated meeting template that shows up every single day that we run our meetings, which is basically every day. And it starts blank. And then what I have set up behind the scenes is a custom agent.

• 7:22Speaker 00

  So we chipped this Notion AI custom agent stuff a little bit ago. And this runs right after the meeting template gets generated. And it looks through all of our like Slack conversation in the last 24 hours. Any tasks in Notion that we close, any poll requests that we've like merged, just like all sorts of context. Oh, and it looks at like yesterday's meeting transcript as well. And then it compiles it basically like a pre read. And this is a, this is one from a week or so ago. And it, yeah, it shows, it pulls metrics, it can show us like what our latest CI time is.

• 8:03Speaker 00

  It shows some of the things we've decided, shows like progress on different like projects or like different things that we're trying to like make faster. Bugs, feedback, open questions, like anything that's like of concern. And like, I can basically work up until like the minute of our meeting without having done a bunch of like prep. And then we all get on a video call and we look at the screen and we're like, okay, here's what we need to talk about. And we'll like hit each bullet. We have like meeting notes that we run down here within Notion.

• 8:45Speaker 00

  And like, all the context is basically captured. All of the like, agenda is like, set up for me. So we spend the entire time talking about like, problems, decisions, wins, findings. Like, what are we gonna work on next? And it's less the like, oh, I did this thing.

• 9:00Claire Vo?

  Yeah, what I want to call out for folks that are maybe listening and not watching is, this is a very detailed meeting, like, kinda like pre-read slash status update, which if you're a, you know, TLM or an EM, running good meetings unfortunately is part of, part of the job. And there's a really big difference between a good stand-up and a bad stand-up. And I think the, the ones you described, these like, wrote, like, I wrote this PR. Today, I'm gonna start on this. And then basically, like, a notes document is a very high level, because some human is putting it together. It stinks. And you start to like, do, the other thing that I found, and maybe I'm, I'm curious if this has impacted how you work,

• 9:45Claire Vo?

  or just made it easier, which is like, you start to have those meetings less, because the updates aren't super rich. People don't feel like it's a good use of their time. And I think you lose something by reducing the frequency. But if you can have high bandwidth, high-quality meetings, with high frequency, without the overhead, I think you can get better, more detailed work done collaboratively, especially if you're running like, a remote team, where not everybody's in the same, same room. So I'm curious, do you feel like just being able to get to this level of detail in your stand-up has improved how you can actually build this product and do these, do this work, basically?

• 10:25Speaker 00

  I've been in way too many meetings where I can tell, like, everybody's eyes are glazed over, nobody's paying attention. And I like, I have run enough projects at this point, where like, to me, that's like, pretty dangerous. Cause like, everybody in that room has ideas, they have insight. But like, because we've made it like, so non-productive and like, not engaging, that like, we're not, we're just like, we need, the point of the meeting is to like, exchange ideas and information. And if we're like, not doing that, like, literally, what's the point? The whole like, this could have been an email, like, that's what the meme is from. And so I, I've found that this is basically a good conversation starter. And-

• 11:10Speaker 00

  A key thing to me that tells me that this is working is when I'm like, I'm running these meetings and kind of going through like bullet by bullet. And then I see like, oh, somebody like fixed our mock server environment in our, our Jest tests and we're seeing a test improvement by like up to 13%. Like, oh, I missed that, you know, that's, that's super cool. Like tell, like, let's talk about it. And then from that, maybe like, oh, there's additional headroom that we can make on this. And so all of a sudden, like, let's drill into it. And so just like, I also think it's sort of democratizes that like sharing so that you've got some people that I could talk for an entire 30 meeting without shutting up.

• 11:54Speaker 00

  And then other engineers are like, you know, kept keeping to themselves, but like brilliant and super talented. And I think it's great. This kind of like raises everything up to the top and makes it very visible.

• 12:06Claire Vo?

  I was, I was thinking last night, truly, this is a little bit of a sidebar, but I was thinking last night how people don't know this. It's very, very confusing as Clairvaux, the podcast hopes. I am such an introvert. I'm a crazy introvert. I will avoid humans with every fiber of my being. And I find like AI as a proxy for me to get over my own anxiety communicating with the world. So insane, but I really feel it whenever I like message my open claw. And I'm like, hey, Polly, can you email so and so blah, blah, blah on my behalf? My anxiety is gone, but when I sit in front of my Gmail and start typing an email, my introvert starts showing. I'm like, I can't, I can't do it.

• 12:49Claire Vo?

  So I think this is a real point, which is like, you got to pull information out of everybody.

• 12:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 12:54Claire Vo?

  And there's like spikes and valleys of who is going to come and show off their work, how detailed they're going to be. It does not mean the work is not good. It does not mean they are not talented. They just have different skills in different environments. And so I love this call out of like, we're going to pull equal amounts of information out of everybody because the playing field is, is equal. I also want to go back to something you said, which makes me think about burnout, but she said, I can like work up until this meeting starts.

• 13:23Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:23Claire Vo?

  And I, I know so many people who feel like they're in meeting after meeting after meeting. One, because when they're not in meetings, they're preparing for meetings. So you're getting rid of that.

• 13:34Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 13:35Claire Vo?

  And then two, I think managers being able to, for example, code up until the stand up is such a burnout, like, protection mechanism, which is you would much rather your managers hands on the code, hands on doing work, filling a creative impulse than prepping for meetings. Sure, they're great at running the meetings, but let's do that in like this just in time mechanism where they're supported through these automations. And so I just imagine, I used to feel so stressed as a leader and as a manager being like, if I'm not in a meeting, I'm prepping for a meeting and then I'm in a meeting. And if I can carve back more of my

• 14:16Claire Vo?

  time to just do real things, that feels so much, so much, so much better. So I'm guessing you're having more fun just through the balance of the kind of work you're trying to do.

• 14:27Speaker 00

  I'm, yeah, I'm having so much more fun working this way. I have done the like, run a big engineering group where, yes, you're spending half of your time just compiling information, synthesizing it, writing reports, like doing all this stuff. And I, I hated it. Like, it's so draining. And now I feel like I'm in a sweet spot where I can support and work with a team of like, very talented individuals, but also not have to, yeah, be like doing like paperwork the entire time. Like, I don't want to do like the tedium. I get a lot of joy out of working with people. It's like why I like managing. I like talking

• 15:08Speaker 00

  with them, having fun. I love like, solving hard problems together. And then I like building stuff. And, um, yeah, I think that we're maybe at an inflection point where, like, maybe this is controversial or not, but like, if you're like a line manager, like, Write, write code, you know, get in there and like,

• 15:32Claire Vo?

  100%.

• 15:33Speaker 00

  Stay, stay close. Maybe don't do the, the, the P zero hero projects, but like,

• 15:37Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 15:38Speaker 00

  Help your team fix bugs, like make optimizations, like whatever, you know, I, it's just, it's so easy now.

• 15:44Claire Vo?

  I mean, I'm going to pull that thread all the way up, which is like, directors of engineering, VPs of engineering, like CTOs.

• 15:52Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:52Claire Vo?

  CPOs, it, right, write some code. Now is the time. And I say this all the time on this podcast. This is the era of the hard skill. This is not, how do I get better at my, my soft skills and managing stakeholders? This is literally like, how do you write code? How do you write automations? How do you learn these new tools? How do you understand what models do, do what for your own skills? That I think is super important. Okay. We could go on forever on this topic. I do want to show folks how you built this.

• 16:20Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 16:20Claire Vo?

  Because we haven't seen, actually haven't seen, we've had a couple of Notion folks on the podcast. We haven't seen Notion AI in action. And I just want to see kind of your thought process on how you build something like this out.

• 16:32Speaker 00

  So I'm going to flip over to, uh, this is our custom agent. Don't ask me why we got this like potato theme for like the entire project. I think it was kind of something about like CI is just this like cobbled together like mess. And so we're going to like make the potato like a rocket ship. I don't know. I don't even know if that makes any sense, but like now we're having fun with it and we have reactions and like agents and it has spun off into its own thing, which is fun. But this is our hot potato agent. So you can see I have this set up to run at 9am every single day. It's also set up for chat. It's set up if the agents mentioned, but we never really used any of that. And probably the important part is the actual instructions.

• 17:15Speaker 00

  So in this instruction page, giving context on like what the purpose of this agent is. I am telling it to run, yeah, look back at 24 hours. So basically telling it, your job is to run every single day. And I only want you to look back for the last like 24 hours of activity. I'm explicitly telling it to use sub agents, which is kind of a sleeper feature in Notion AI. Like this exists, but we don't, we don't really push it to use it very often yet because it's, one, it's very expensive. And two, it can be kind of finicky sometimes, but um, I helped build it. So I'm, I know how this works. And then I ask it to kind of like fan out and do like a map reduce where I'm saying,

• 17:57Speaker 00

  "Go use the Honeycomb MCP to figure out what the latest metric is. Look in our project channel and like find updates, feedback, questions." I tell it where the task database is and how to look for tasks within this project, and then how to find yesterday's meeting. And then I give it a template in the instructions where I'm like, "This is your format. I care about CI speed, decisions, progress, changes, bugs, questions, risks, a little bit of guidance on writing." And then when it's done, I have it post to Slack and I like emphasize this like, I want it to be brief and fun. And sometimes it's really corny and then sometimes it's like really good.

• 18:41Speaker 00

  And it'll be very quirky and just post this like link in our Slack channel. And it's like, "Hey, here's your, your pre-read, some little quibble about like whatever, you know, like, "Hey, you guys are not making enough progress." And then that's it. And then it's, we have our meeting note, it's updated. What I like the most about this one, I can show you some of our like internal settings. So this is like, I give it access to all of these things. And I'm like, "You can only view all of this stuff." Cause I don't want it going and like modifying our task database or project database. Like everybody at Notion uses those. But this meetings database in particular, I'm like, "Yo, you can edit content." Cause this is the one you're gonna like write and update the page.

• 19:24Speaker 00

  It can read from our Slack channels, respond to our project one. And then this was new to me, actually, when I set this agent up is our MCP. So we've had MCP and we have this other thing called workers, which is like, kind of like writing code. I haven't used them very much within custom agents, but in this one in particular, I'm like, "I know exactly where this metric is. It's in Honeycomb." And so I like just configured the MCP in Notion. By the way, I like, I like used the agent to like set itself up. Cause I was like, "Here's the query." I literally gave it a screenshot of the Honeycomb query. I was like, "I don't know how this works. Can you just like update your instructions?"

• 20:08Claire Vo?

  I love that you screenshot it. You didn't even copy and paste it. You're like, "Please OCR this screenshot."

• 20:14Speaker 00

  Exactly. Too lazy. I'm like, "Here it is, just take it." Figured it out and it it kind of it got it mostly like most of the way there. I had to fiddle with it a little bit, but yeah.

• 20:26Claire Vo?

  What what I appreciate about this, and again, for anybody trying to just brainstorm workflows where AI can actually have a huge impact on your productivity at work or life, I just feel like write down what you would do if you had time. If you had time, every morning at nine, you would sit down and you with your eyebrows would go through Slack, you would go through Honeycomb, you would ask people what's going on, you would look at GitHub and then you would compile it and then you would try to be very fun and slack like it's it's just a description of what you would do and

• 20:59Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 21:00Claire Vo?

  It's it doesn't have to be that complicated and you can iterate so quickly on it. What I appreciate about this, you know, versus old era of more deterministic like workflow style builders is the updates are so easy to make. Just change the natural language, redo the order, change the trigger, give it more access to data and then it's it's ready, ready to go.

• 21:24Speaker 00

  Yeah, and you know, I think the other thing I I've gotten hung up on when trying to think about like these automations and I I've seen others do is that like you get this like you start gigabraining it and you're like, well, how am I gonna save like five hours of work a day? And I what you just said made me realize too that like the the tedium that this removes for me is not like world changing, but it's like 20 minutes a day. And that's like 20 minutes I can spend doing other stuff and that like it's not even just about like saving that 20 minutes, but it's like protecting my brain from like having to context shift about all this stuff and like ingest it and instead, yeah, it's just,

• 22:09Speaker 00

  I know that the information will be there when I'm ready to like read it and I'm ready to like shift gears to this project rather than. Yeah. I I hate doing the like, read this update, copy all this information, like put it into like an update board, like it's soul sucking.

• 22:25Claire Vo?

  I mean, you and I have been doing this for a while. That's like, that was, I feel like 70% of my job. At some point, 70% of my job was just like, what's going on? And how do I massage it into a format appropriate for the audience at hand? And it's always the same information. It's just like, what's the executive version of it? And what's the team version of it? And what's the full team version of it? And like, ah, like my shoulders drop out of my ears when I realize we don't have, like, we just don't have to do it anymore. And the other thing that I think people maybe underappreciate about AI and this like just-in-time delivery is your AI, your agent is never going to complain when you ask it to do this five minutes before the meeting starts.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  I know. It's so, it's so great.

• 23:13Claire Vo?

  It's so great. It's just like, when you have it, drop it, get it done and out of your brain, I think is, again, I go back to like burnout and enjoying your work and reducing toil. And it just feels like a more relaxed way to work.

• 23:30Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 23:31Claire Vo?

  Yeah, we're happy.

• 23:33Speaker 00

  It's so funny because it is more relaxing and it's more fun. And I feel like I'm getting more done.

• 23:38Claire Vo?

  Yeah.

• 23:38Speaker 00

  It's weird to have like this like win-win-win.

• 23:41Claire Vo?

  Yeah. You know, they, they do the triangle and they're like, pick two. And you're like, no, I want to pick all three.

• 23:45Speaker 00

  Yeah. And I'm like, give me the whole triangle.

• 23:47Claire Vo?

  Give me the whole triangle. That, stamp it for the YouTube thumbnail. Give me the whole triangle. All right. This episode is brought to you by Orkus, the company behind Open Source Conductor, which powers complex workflows and process orchestration for modern enterprise apps in agentic workflows. Legacy business process automation tools are breaking down. Siloed low-code platforms, outdated process management systems and disconnected API management tools weren't built for today's AI-powered world. Orkus changes that. With Orkus Conductor, you get a modern orchestration layer that scales with high reliability and brings humans, AI and systems together in real time. It's not just about tasks. It's about orchestrating everything.

• 24:30Claire Vo?

  APIs, microservices, data pipelines, human in the loop actions, and even autonomous agents. So build, test and debug complex workflows with ease, all while maintaining enterprise-grade security, compliance and observability. Orkus. Orchestrate the future of work. Learn more and start building at orkes.io. Let's talk about, so we're talking about how meetings happen. Love this. You do write code, though.

• 24:57Speaker 00

  I do write code.

• 24:58Claire Vo?

  Sometimes with your fingers and sometimes with, you're in my favorite harness of the moment. So let's go to how you get coded.

• 25:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, I want to show the little bit of a new workflow that we have going on in Notion. I honestly don't think this is necessarily a big feature that we're gonna ship or some, we might ship some version of this feature. So this is all basically internal only at this point. But prior to this, the way, one, I love Codex. Been a Codex stan for like, I don't know, six, seven months now. And we started, we started building this like Codex integration into Notion. Prior to this, it was like, well, I mean, obviously you're using the CLI to like write your prompt. And then they created the Codex app, which is, which is nice, but I'm still like writing my prompt in this thing.

• 25:52Speaker 00

  So I started actually writing prompts in Notion pages where I can be a little bit more like free formed and structured. And, you know, I'm in like the CLI, I don't have to worry about like hitting enter and then like, oh shit, like I sent my prompts. I can actually like write a document in Notion. But then of course I'm like cop, or like highlighting all of the text, copying it, going into my terminal, hitting paste and like letting it go. It's like, fine. There's like MCPs and other stuff that I could be using, but I'm, I'm a very simple person. It was like too much, too much stuff. So we built this thing that we're kind of like calling it, I think we're calling it both software factory. But I like its internal project name is Boxee.

• 26:36Speaker 00

  Cause it's like all these little VMs that we install Codex and Claude Code on. It's our little boxes where now we can actually invoke them from like tasks within Notion. And so, literally happened this morning, a friend of mine who's a Notion fan texts me, he's like, hey, I like the tab block that you built.

• 26:59Speaker 00

  Which is this thing. He's like, but I really wish I could like, you know, I can like copy, I'll show you now. If I click on the dot, dot, dot thing next to a block, there's like copy link to block. He's like, man, I really wish I could just like copy link to a tab and then like send it to somebody. And I was like, oh yeah, that that sounds really easy. So I opened up this task and I just took some notes and I dropped in this screenshot showing um where it could live. You know, this is like on the the tab block. If I right click on it, we get this little flyover menu. And I just described the task. I was like, yeah, let's put a copy link button here. I also noticed that hovering over the delete button didn't change to red. So I was like, yeah, we should fix that.

• 27:43Speaker 00

  And I was like, I know one edge case is like, you're gonna have to like, if you land on a URL where we're like linking to this block and this tab, like it's gotta like switch to the tab on like fresh refreshes. So I like, kinda outlined all the the cases, but you can see here, this is one, two, three paragraphs, four, like four sentences and a screenshot. It was like, not a lot. And then this new thing that we built, I can actually mention codecs from within our comments. And this triggers are like boxy. This is all our like internal dev tooling stuff. And then it got to work.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  And I was looking at the timestamps earlier and I think 1040, 1051, started the implementation. And then another 10 minutes later, it replies with a pull request link and a preview URL because we like, we do the like preview environment stuff. And it like built the entire thing. And if I switch actually over to, here's the pull requests. It built like the entire thing. It was like, here's how I tested it. And this, this was actually the coolest part to me is like, it actually uploaded screenshots of it doing its own like UI verification. And there was like a CI failure in it.

• 29:04Speaker 00

  So I was like, hey, I replied down here like, oh, yeah, this part of this code change, I was like, I don't know what is going on here. This doesn't make sense. There's some type check things and it was like, cool. Here's why we did this change and I fixed your types. And then there was a merge conflict.

• 29:24Claire Vo?

  Let's also talk about just old world to world.

• 29:29Claire Vo?

  The emotions around code review.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  Uh huh.

• 29:32Claire Vo?

  Like, I love that you're like, I don't get this. Not, I'm gonna try to get it. Or I've done my best to investigate and I'm pretty sure this is wrong. Like, literally, it just, I don't get it. I don't get it. I mean, I didn't like sending that to somebody. One of your teammates. Be like, no, look it up. It makes it, so that's one of my, one of my code review mechanisms as well. Is I'm just like, I don't think this is right.

• 29:59Speaker 00

  I, yeah, one, one, one line that I've been putting in my prompts lately is I'm like, I literally don't know what I'm doing here. You need to explain this to me. Especially doing all this CI stuff. I'm like, I'm in over my head. Like, you gotta, you gotta like, explain it like I'm a five-year-old. And sometimes it's like, literally like caveman style, like here are the things. And I'm like, I needed this.

• 30:22Claire Vo?

  Well, what I appreciate about this, and we'll talk about it a little bit later, I think, is we're not getting any of these Claude code warm fuzzies from Codex. I love it, but when it talks to me, I'm like, I feel real dumb when you're talking to me, Codex. Can you?

• 30:38Speaker 00

  Like, okay, okay, dumb dumb, here's what's going on.

• 30:42Claire Vo?

  So I think that sort of like, I don't understand what I'm doing. Please explain it to me is, I love it, but I think it is a Codex-specific experience.

• 30:53Claire Vo?

  Claude Code shows up and is like, hey buddy, guess what I made for you?

• 30:59Claire Vo?

  Okay, so stepping back before we go too deep on the personalities of all these coding models. You have built just at mention, and I think people miss this, but it's important for particularly our engineering team and engineering leader listeners to pay attention to, which is everybody that knows it's smart, it has some background agent hooked up to a virtual machine that they kick off so that you're not spinning up your local environment and doing all this stuff on your machine.

• 31:27Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 31:28Claire Vo?

  And it just, I think the velo, we'll, we'll talk about this, but the velocity plus your DevX plus your CI, I think, is a huge piece of AI adoption in engineering. So if you are not, if you don't have a like VM strategy and background agent strategy in your large engineering org, time, time to get one, time to do it.

• 31:48Speaker 00

  Totally agree.

• 31:49Claire Vo?

  And we'll just ask Codex to build it. Be like, I don't know what I'm talking about, but I think, I think this is, Claire said this was a good idea. Please build, make no mistake. Um, okay, last, last one, we have a last use case you were gonna, you were gonna walk us through.

• 32:06Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we recently rebuilt our entire agent harness. The quick TLDR is just like everybody else, we reached like this point of tool instruction fatigue, where you had this bloated system prompts, we're like, okay, we need to dumb this down. And we borrowed the kind of like skills and progressive disclosure concept from coding agents and brought that to Notion AI. And when we were doing this big rewrite, we were asking ourselves like, you know, it had only been like six months since we shipped the last rewrite. And this time we were like, what would, what would we do differently? Like seeing the state of the art with coding agents? And someone had this really great idea to like, let's not start with code, like let's

• 32:51Speaker 00

  just start with specs. And what we've ended up building is we have this like in our checked into our code base, you see this, we have this, we're looking at, this is a Notion repo, but we have this agent specs subfolder. And within this subfolder, we have all of these markdown documents. This is one that, that I worked on. We have this thing in our AI called Ask Mode where we Basically ban all the mutating tools. So it can only just read and answer questions. And so when I was building this, I didn't start with writing code. I didn't start with anything. I just started with an empty markdown document. And I mean, I actually just opened up Whisper

• 33:33Speaker 00

  and just started yapping about how this feature should work. And then at the end of it, I gave that, I gave the yap session to Codex and was like, here's our other spec library. Learn the format, take my information, write a spec. And then it spiked the first version. I did a couple revisions on it. And it ended up with this markdown document. Now, the markdown document is like, it's nice. But what we did with it next, in my opinion, is I kind of think that this is like the future of software engineering, where I then opened up Codex again, pointed it at this spec file and I said, build it.

• 34:16Speaker 00

  And it basically one shotted this because the entire spec file is so comprehensive with code pointers, with down at the bottom, we have verification. It was like, here is how you're going to verify all of this stuff works. And we've even built our own CLI tools so that you can run Notion AI from the CLI. And it could, once it's done seeing that all the tests pass, it can actually just spin up Notion AI itself, send it queries, send it questions, enable ask mode, disable ask mode, and then see the transcripts and see what actually happens. And I think the first shot of this took a couple hours, but I came back to whatever, a couple thousand lines, did some code review, played with it myself.

• 35:00Speaker 00

  And I was like, it's right, it's like done. And since then, we've made, I can, the beauty of this is like, this is in version control. So I can go to the past changes of this spec file and I can see how the spec has evolved. And I could go look through all of the code changes, which also have their own like history. But this is now the sort of like source of truth for how this part of Notion AI works. And it's just in plain English that can then be verified and implemented by agents.

• 35:34Claire Vo?

  Well, I think the other thing that people don't appreciate is, you know, taking this outside of the engineering flow is this plain English can be ingested by other parts of the business that need this information. So let's say you need to then release this feature via some sort of marketing. This is actually like a pretty good asset that explains how it works. That can be translated into another, another thing in a way that like code itself is still a little intractable. And so this idea of spec driven development, but what I like about what you said, I don't want people to miss is the way you make these updates is you update the spec and go, go, go look, make the, make the update, change the thing.

• 36:15Speaker 00

  Exactly.

• 36:16Claire Vo?

  Um, and so like the spec is the source of truth. The spec as the, the change log, I think is a really interesting model. And for people that aren't watching, it's very detailed, it's very technical. So it's not like there is not code in the spec. There's just not all the code in, in the spec. And I think that's a really kind of good hybrid model for experienced engineers to start to bridge into what would it look like to have an agent? Do more of your coding work while you still do architecture work, while you still do design work, while you still make sure that the thing is going to scale.

• 36:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. I, I view our job as like engineers evolving into like systems thinkers and architects. And not, and not even just necessarily writing like the spec and thinking about the behaviors. But most importantly is like the verification loop. Like, is it a, like, how should it verify correctness of this feature or this change?

• 37:21Speaker 00

  And honestly, it's like if it can't, or if like the verification's a little hazy, it's like, that's the first thing you actually should be going and doing is like, do you have a tool to let the agent run itself? That's like, one of the first things we did with this project was like, we, we should actually build a CLI so that I can tell Codex, like, send this prompt and like, see what happens. And now that we have that, then we can take these specs and actually just like, go deeper and deeper and deeper. And so it's like, we're still doing engineering, but I'm not doing the like plumbing work of like, wiring up this ask mode feature.

• 37:53Claire Vo?

  Well, and one thing is really funny is, I mean, I've been in software engineering for 20 plus years. Like, we were writing these documents anyways. We were writing technical design documents, back to documents anyway. And we were sitting in meetings with other engineers debating the merits of one implementation versus another. And then we still had to go write the code.

• 38:15Speaker 00

  Yep.

• 38:16Claire Vo?

  It was like, really, it hasn't added work to, to go into this model. It's maybe like shifted the emphasis of where the human attention goes. But these were documents that, at least I was, in every org that I've ever been in, writing before. And the other thing that I think has changed so much is those meet, those docs then waited for review. And they waited for a meeting. And now, no more waiting for the meeting, no more waiting for review. Ship it, have a verification loop, debate it on the merits of it being live and working versus the theoretical merits of it sitting in a document, waiting for everybody's calendar to open up for, you know, a live argument.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  Yep, yeah, couldn't agree more.

• 39:01Claire Vo?

  Let's, let's do it. Uh, this is the, I, I, just you and I could talk all day about this. Just to recap for everybody, because I know I gotta get you out of here. Three use cases, one, never prep for a meeting again. Hook it up not only to your Slack, but to your meeting notes, your GitHub, your telemetry, and build the best stand-up meeting. So no one has to stand there glassy-eyed, being boring, giving updates. Second use case, background agents, at mention from wherever you work. Notion being a great place to do that. Kicking off virtual machines, getting PRs done, just saying yes when your friend texts you, can you ship this feature? And then the last one. Putting all your specs in your repo, using them as a source of truth for a more autonomous

• 39:44Claire Vo?

  coding agent like Codex, let it cook for a couple hours, review the code, and then when you update, update the specs, don't update the code. Did I get it right?

• 39:53Speaker 00

  Nailed it.

• 39:54Claire Vo?

  Okay, let's do a couple lightning round questions and I'll get you out of here. You and I love Codex. Why you love Codex? I'll tell you why I love Codex, but you go first.

• 40:02Speaker 00

  Okay, well, so I first, I first fell in love, oh my god, did I just say that?

• 40:09Claire Vo?

  You did.

• 40:09Speaker 00

  I first, I first fell in love with Codex because when I was evaluating both Claude Code and Codex, I found anytime Claude Code filled up its context window, it would just kind of like lose the plot really quickly. And Codex, I don't, I don't know exactly what it's doing, if it's the model, if it's the compaction, if it's like both, but it can, it can grind for like hours. And with, with the way that I work, both the systems and things that I work on, and just like, I like to be able to fire off a bunch of them, like at the same time, and then like go to a meeting, or go do something else,

• 40:51Speaker 00

  or like spend my time kind of like round robin managing like all of these agents. Like I, I don't necessarily want to, I'm not the person that is like sitting with the browser open and like some agent next to it and like iterate, look at the browser, iterate, look at the browser. I'm like, the more, the closer I can get to one-shotting solutions, the better, because that frees me up to do other stuff. So I found that like Codex was, was pretty good about that. I also just feel it's like, pretty simple. Like it's, there's not a lot of bells and whistles. It's not like too fancy necessarily. I'm happy with. The addition of like MCP and skills and some like other stuff coming out.

• 41:34Speaker 00

  I also really love GPT-5-4. I think it's a great model. So I'm like, all of those things together, it's just, it really like matches my working style and type of work a lot.

• 41:46Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I'll, I'll tell you why I love Codex and I sent this to somebody. I said, work trees everywhere, ports 3,000 through 3,009 spoken for like, we're just, we're just going across, across the board. I do think it's good at long running tasks. I like its concept of projects because I run a lot of different projects. I think it's just like a very helpful mental model. And then it's great at code review, honestly.

• 42:13Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:13Claire Vo?

  It's just like a really good code reviewer. It's a really good security reviewer, tireless, uncomplaining with the most tedious of things. And so I, I find it's one of my daily drivers. I just, I really like it. It's good. Okay. Second question, because you and I also agree on this. Give people the reason. This isn't even a question. This is a, a demand for you to share my point of view, which is why bang on developer experience and CI speed right now?

• 42:45Speaker 00

  A couple, a couple of things. To me, CI was like super important prior to agents. Because in my opinion, I mean, it's not even an opinion. It's like fact that like the faster your CI completes, the faster you get signal, the faster you're like, the more comfortable your engineers will feel with like making changes and doing things because they know like I can make a change and get it pushed into dev or into production really quick because I know my CI is fast. If it's slower, then you're building up these like monster changes and you're going to be even slower about like judiciously like reviewing every little like tiny thing when I, I'm like a learn through like doing sort of person. And if

• 43:30Speaker 00

  I can close the iteration loop like even tighter, then I'm going to be putting out a change. People are going to be using it. I will take that feedback. Make another change and I'll have to worry about,

• 43:42Speaker 00

  you know, it taking another day before like the deploy train is ready to go. I just want to like, I want to crank really, really fast. And that was all pre-agent. And now that we're like in the agent land, it's, it's that, but like on steroids because agents don't get tired. They can work on a VM, they can work like while I'm sleeping. And, you know, if I'm take, if I've got a CI loop that takes an hour to run, that your agent's just going to sit there and spin for like an hour waiting for results to like do something. If it takes three minutes to run, like holy crap, how much more stuff are you, you as a human, and then especially as your like little swarm of agents going to be able to get done? Like so, so much more. And so I, super important.

• 44:26Claire Vo?

  I, I agree. And we just had Steve from Stripe on and they're doing like 1,300 agent PRs a week. You cannot do, yeah, you like cannot do that if your CI is slow. It's just, you might as well be throwing all those PRs in the trash. And so I do think there is just a true mathematical limit on your capacity to ship code to production. That is a reflection of how fast your CI pipeline is. And so if you are, again, engineering leaders, if you are not spending time on making that fast and you are tolerating something slow there, you're not going to get the, the benefits of AI that you could. And honestly, like good for AI, good for humans. No engineer wants to sit waiting for their stuff to hit, hit production.

• 45:11Claire Vo?

  It's miserable on the engineer side, lots of downsides. So allocate time to your pipeline, please.

• 45:18Speaker 00

  Yep, yep.

• 45:19Claire Vo?

  Ryan, Ryan and Claire say so. All right. Last question. When AI is not listening, it's writing bad specs, it's not being funny in Slack, what is your prompting strategy? Do you yell?

• 45:35Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 45:36Claire Vo?

  Yeah, I can tell.

• 45:37Speaker 00

  I can be a little bit of a diva sometimes if it like really goes off the rails. Though, the other prompting strategy that has like saved my ass working on the CI stuff lately is because like even the best models I feel like can sometimes be a little sycophantic. I'll be like, I will just like be like, you're wrong. Like, you need to defend your argument. Because I like, I want it to defend it in the way that I like, I want. But I'm like, I just need, I just need to see the evidence that if I push counter to what it has done, that it can like back up with like good pointed reasons rather than just be like, are, you know, are you sure this like change looks okay? It's like, oh, boy, it's like totally fine. I'm like, no, no, no.

• 46:22Speaker 00

  I need like the cited hard argument against it. Because like, and a lot of times, like with the CI stuff, I'm like, I don't know what I'm doing. I know generally what I'm doing, but like the specifics are a lot more nuanced and I like, I need to get this right. And that's been super helpful. And then when it goes off the rails, I'm like, I could be such a diva to it.

• 46:46Claire Vo?

  Escape, all caps, no. That's what I do. Interrupt and no. Steer the conversation. Little arrow button has never gotten so much work. Ryan, this was so much fun. Where can we find you and how can we be helpful?

• 47:02Speaker 00

  Uh, you can find me on X. I'm out there shilling for Notion right now a lot. But that's, that's basically where I spend my time. Yeah, my DMs are open, so if you have Notion problems, I like to try and fix them. I, I'll send it to Boxee and we'll get it done.

• 47:20Claire Vo?

  Perfect, love it. Well, thanks for joining the podcast.

• 47:23Speaker 00

  Thanks for having me, Claire.

• 47:25Claire Vo?

  Thanks so much for watching. If you enjoyed this show, please like and subscribe here on YouTube or even better, leave us a comment with your thoughts. You can also find this podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Please consider leaving us a rating and review, which will help others find the show. You can see all our episodes and learn more about the show at howiaipod.com. See you next time.