Why Notion’s biggest AI breakthrough came from simplifying everything

When initially experimenting with LLMs and agentic AI, software engineers at Notion AI applied advanced code generation, complex schemas, and heavy instructioning. 

Quickly, though, trial and error taught the team that it could get rid of all of that complicated data modeling. Notion’s AI engineering lead Ryan Nystrom and his team pivoted to simple prompts, human-readable representations, minimal abstraction, and familiar markdown formats. The result was dramatically improved model performance.