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In this doc, we propose cultural and process recommendations to improve AI education and tooling at Notion.

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“One person’s breakthrough should become everyone’s baseline. The biggest failure mode wasn’t that people couldn’t figure things out. It was that everyone had to figure things out alone. A workflow discovered by one person didn’t help anyone else. Glass needed to compound wins into organizational capability: shared skills, propagated best practices, and a floor that rises with every discovery.”

AI Education

Learning AI is overwhelming! There’s tons of new concepts thrown at you (from skills, to loops, to graphs), new models and tools, and the state of the world changes so quickly, and it’s like learning a new language. We’re all beginners again.

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Current state of the world

1. AI Devtools Hub is our home for AI education
2. Knowledge channels: #ai-wins, #eng-ai-coding-tools exist for broader sharing
3. Tools channels: #eng-claude-code-users, #eng-cursor-users and several other channels exist
4. Working Group: We have a #wg-ai-devtool-recommendations group (currently paused). It used to be weekly/bi-weekly.
5. AI Bootcamp: In May, we hosted an event with 55 engineers across EPD to share practices and come up with RFCs.
6. AI Dev Buddy / Belts program: Set up mentorship pairings but has slowed down a bit. </aside>

Where do we go next?

We’d like to take the core ideas and goals of AI Dev Buddy program + AI Bootcamp and bring them into weekly & monthly life @ Notion!

Proposal:

• #wg-ai-devtool-recommendations → AI Coding Working Group
  • Responsibilities include:
    • Make AI tooling & models recommendations
      • (Many things like procurement, spend are still within scope of DevEx, like procurement but this group can help advise those too)
    • Write newsletter + drive AI sharing & coworking days (see below)
    • Discuss and improve culture & education
  • ≤8 engineers as core group. Highly motivated people who care a lot about AI education and tooling at Notion. Meets 1x per month. Guests can come in from time to time too.
  • 👥 Erdem as EM sponsor?
• Bring back the AI Tools newsletter, but build a better template and use AI to round up content from across the company into one place.
  • Maybe called “AI Coding Digest”? IDK
  • Every 3 weeks, Friday at noon.
  • Sections
    • Models & Tools recommendations
    • Mini articles
      • (Some written by Notinos, some not)
    • Surveys
    • Wins & tips aggregated from slack channels
  • Maybe even print them and put them in bathrooms ????
    • (If so, we’d want it to be helpful for non-eng too.)
  • 👥 Stephen is happy to be EM sponsor, but each issue will need a new curator.
• Retire AI Dev Buddy program → AI Sharing & Coworking Days
  • Broadly encourage more pairing at the team level and create spaces for coworking and learning from each other.
  • Bi-weekly Tuesday AI coding sessions [Standing slot, every 2 hours, in-person]
    • First 0-30 mins: Sharing (online)
    • 30mins → : Coworking & pairing in-person (NYC + SF + HYD), discuss with people around you, share tips, pair, mentorship.
  • Ambient time for folks in-person to go in and share their setups, work together on real problems and help each other prompt
  • 👥 Needs a couple DRIs for this
• Simplify AI Devtools Hub with clearer models & tools guidance (see below)
  • “Default Path” guidance vs opt-in “Curious to explore more?” guidance should be separated. Mark things as emerging or experimental.
  • General guidance should be simple to understand and very easy for 70% of people to just adopt and not have to overthink it
• Announce all these changes in #epd-announce
• Have EMs push for more code pairing and synchronous work (code reviews, coworking, talking out RFCs live, etc)
  • How do we help people collaborate, be less isolated, and share knowledge more?

Models & Tools Guidance

It’s great that Notion gives us access to all these tools and models.

However, it’s also intimidating. Some people are piloting many tools at once, trying lots of different models. There’s so much knowledge coming from everywhere!