A two-day visit to Notion showed rapid adoption of AI-assisted "vibe coding" and tangible code production. Notion is a 1,000-person, venture-backed San Francisco startup valued at $10 billion that builds a heavily templated to-do and note-taking application. Many engineers at Notion rely on AI tools, and some companies estimate 30–40 percent of their code is generated by AI. Notion's complexity drives a large online ecosystem of productivity tutorials, including videos with millions of views. New hires pair-program with experienced engineers and experiment with AI coding platforms such as Cursor during onboarding to ship features quickly.
Notion is a 1,000-person, venture-backed San Francisco startup with a $10 billion valuation. It makes the ultimate to-do and note-taking app, consisting of so many templates and tables and ways to format tasks that figuring out how to use Notion is a task in itself. On YouTube, productivity gurus attempt to make sense of Notion using the well-worn vernacular of personal optimization. One such video is titled "How to Get Started in Notion Without Losing Your Mind." It has 3.4 million views.
I was scheduled to start at Notion as a vibe-coding engineer on a Thursday in mid-July. The night before, I found myself panic-watching these YouTube videos. Surely I would need to be a power user of the app if Notion was allowing me—an English major!—to fiddle with its code base. In an earlier onboarding call, a new coworker had encouraged me to download the AI coding platform Cursor and play around with it. I did. No real code emerged from this homework.
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