Forgive me for living in a cave, but is there any reason to use Notion if you don’t need the collaboration features? My experience with Notion on an M2 MacBook Air (8 GB RAM) is that it brings the machine to its knees.
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?
Here is my bold prediction - Microsoft will try acquire Notion within a year.
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.
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.
This is what I mostly want. I want to keep track of things and when I have half done the work I want to note that and split the to-do and things like that. I want to say things to notes and have it write it down like me. I use Reminders app with my wife and use LLM to manage it. This would make me end up using Notion for personal life perhaps, but it has to be good. Problem with first-party agent is that I'm stuck with garbage agent because either:
* they have decided to "have our own model" (always garbage model)
* they have decided to "collaborate with X" (and this model rapidly gets outdated)
It’s wild they do not talk about accountability features for the ai at all. I.e how do I even know if it has hallucinated if it can do anything anywhere in the workspace?
Dear Notion employees, please, if you're advertise mail and calendar as features, add them into your app and do not make them open in new tabs. I want an all in one thing, why is that so hard, you already have tabs built in? Thanks!
Speaking about Notion, are there more developer-focused alternatives? I want to be able to write and sync Markdown. I would love to have something like Obsidian, but at the team level.
I really like the web experience of Notion. (In terms of looks and feels). And it's probably the only note-taking app I like that syncs across everything automagically.
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).
I have entirely no clue about how other folks are using Notion .... but, errr – how exactly is this supposed to help me, or work at all?
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.
A question for people who interact with non-trivial Notion documents: Have they fixed the sluggishness? Some people I've talked to say that Notion has made massive improvements in that direction, and that slowness is no longer an issue. I also hear a lot of complaints online. Perhaps their native apps are fast and webapp is slow?
Every time I use notion I can feel the PMs working there under pressure to ship some arbitrary (more often than not "AI") feature each quarter to meet some arbitrary KPI set by leadership.
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.
Notion's USP was always simplicity. Anyone could use it, anyone could find data in it, the lack of features was a selling point. But, as you say, the attitude changed at some point from aggressive simplicity to feature bloat and now AI slop.
Rare occasion where beloved project doubled down on the wrong direction. Instead of a personal knowledge base it becomes a company's knowledge base with little to no effort in improving "singleplayer" experience.
Great reminder to export all Notion data to markdown and use a different tool.
"For example, tell it to “compile customer feedback from Slack, Notion, and email into actionable insights” and watch it research across your tools, synthesize findings, create a structured database, then notify you when it’s done."
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.
... How about fixing basic things like the cursor position in code blocks, and being able to select text on mobile, instead of unnecessary "AI Agents"?
Or is the frontend now supposedly obsolete since all the work will be done by "AI"?
My installed Notion version appears to be 4.20.0 so presumably I am a visitor from the future sent back to warn you all that Notion will continue to be slow and clunky and full of AI shit nobody wants.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 47.1 ms ] threadIt 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?
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.
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?
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?
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.
I prefer one tool for one job approach.
Could someone please explain benefits of using one-does-all tools?
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"?
https://apps.apple.com/US/app/id1501944799