Intel / video

Notion’s Sarah Sachs & Simon Last on Custom Agents, Evals, and the Future of Work

Why it matters

Notion's engineers explain when 's narrow beats a full coding with a runtime, and why they favor CLIs elsewhere. Useful for agent tool design.

Terms in this piece · Glossary

eval — A repeatable test for AI quality — a set of tasks plus scoring — used the way software teams use test suites, because model output is too variable to judge by eyeballing.
MCP — The Model Context Protocol — an open standard that lets any AI assistant plug into any tool or data source without custom integration code.
tool permissions — The rules governing which tools an agent may call and which need confirmation — the boundary between a mistake and an incident.
AI agent — An AI system that doesn't just answer once but works toward a goal in a loop — taking actions, reading the results, and deciding what to do next.