It strikes me that if Notion is a nice wrapper for a database, and the agent is being tasked with interfacing with that wrapper, why not skip the wrapper entirely? If they’re trying to offload most of your interaction with the application to an LLM agent, it seems like it doesn’t matter where the data lives. So why not use a Claude Code agent to do the same things for you locally?
I assume the alternative here is Obsidian.
It does have features that Obsidian doesn't have (like better URL preview). But it's mostly UI stuff. If you literally just want to manage some .md notes I'd say there isn't a reason to use Notion.
Notion seems have a lot of hype lately, and Microsoft tries to be king of the hill when it comes to productivity apps, buying tools encroaching upon their turf of Outlook and Excel (6 Wunderkinder, Yammer, Ally.io) or competing vigorously if they cant buy them (Teams). Seems like this Notion v3 could tip it over the edge into full blown productivity powerhouse.
Despite Slack's presence in the startup space, Teams dominates the market (fair play or not different story).
I'm not sure I buy Microsoft being that interested in Notion's customer base.
Microsoft do already have their own Notion ripoff/inspired product (Loop) though. It is a bit half-assed and the development pace is glacial so perhaps a new team behind it would be something they'd be interested in.
A bit? The table views don't even handle sorting from either a persistence or collaborative perspective. If you want to sort a table, do it yourself.
So I won't be surprised if OpenAI or Anthropic or some AI company buys Notion and makes it their playground to launch AI capabilities.
Oh dear, more AI slop that's going to try to force itself on you, like a creepy uncle at a party. This "agents" thing seems to be a meaningless buzzword that every product must now use. I'd rather they focused on polishing the product or left it as it is, not contaminating it with trash that just gets in the way.
* they have decided to "have our own model" (always garbage model)
* they have decided to "collaborate with X" (and this model rapidly gets outdated)
What on god's green earth sort of a line is this?
The only feature I miss from Notion is the ability to publically share a page so that people outside your team can read it. But that's not a big deal.
I guess Obsidian works in a similar way (markdown files) and would have more features, but there's no user permissions system. And it's closed source.
It would've really helped if they worked on improving their subpar mobile apps, but instead they are focusing on AI features.
(Which, I don't see much incremental benefit in paying for separately, if I already pay for other AI subs like chatgpt).
How could the AI possibly know what I want to put in? The whole point of note taking and ordering and rearranging data is that I have the control over it. And by that a better understanding.
I'd love to hear your informed take on this.
If it really is slow, how is it so successful?
Every few months I have to split up pages and move stuff to archive because it becomes unusably slow. When I open the mobile app to write a quick note it's just frozen for several seconds, recent edits are not synced and so on.
Yes I should switch to something else but haven't found solution I like yet.
The base product was originally great: very smooth wysiwyg collaborative document editor with wiki-like linking. The problem is you don't need to do much on top of that. But clearly investors demand some "results" so PMs need to keep coming up with features that can be shipped in a quarter. Meanwhile bugs in the basic UX are plentiful.
Any really interesting work to improve the basic "collaborative document" experience is going to take time and experimentation, and I'm sure there's something to be found there. But the investor fueled focus on constantly doing something new and shiny means these really interesting spaces will never be explore and the product will continue to degrade with bloat each quarter.
(Databases was, and still are, a bit half-baked but the thing was relatively fast & powerful vs say Confluence or Apple Notes)
Meanwhile consumers have been asking for better Siri for ages, and that hasn't been delivered yet.
It's unfortunate that it's an online service. At least with tools like OneNote, now that it's been screwed up with cloud, AI, etc we can still go back to the old perpetual license, local-first versions which are still great.
I prefer one tool for one job approach.
Could someone please explain benefits of using one-does-all tools?
Most people got hooked before it was that convoluted.
Great reminder to export all Notion data to markdown and use a different tool.
I wonder when for the first time a team of humans will complete a full project based on a finding that turned out to be hallucinated in a sub step of an AI agent.
Or is the frontend now supposedly obsolete since all the work will be done by "AI"?
saejox•4mo ago
raincole•4mo ago
pembrook•4mo ago
matznerd•4mo ago
After a few rounds of AI generating AI content from AI content, I'm sure it could eventually become slop...like the model collapse lol idk.
"AI models collapse when trained on recursively generated data" - https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
kermatt•4mo ago
trinix912•4mo ago
refset•4mo ago
Lotus Notes was the original offline-first everything app, including cutting edge PKI and encryption. It worked over dial-up and needed only a handful of MBs of memory (before the Java rewrite at least). Has anything else really come close since?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes
notrealyme123•4mo ago
But instead more ai slop.
And thats not the worst. Every time when a company adds ai features, i know they want to train on my data sooner or later.
So hard pass for that one.
edit: seems like webhooks are here now. Will give them a try, but knowing notion, expect wild limitations
piokoch•4mo ago
Now you are welcomed by a "AI chat" that wants me to specify what a great application I want to create. Total madness...
pflenker•4mo ago
I use LLMs to extract key points, make proposals or generate a short summary, but I personally want to manually be responsible for adding all this and I don't want my note taking tool to do this unsupervised in the background.