What Codex unlocks for Notion

At Notion, Codex is changing how engineers build. The company is rethinking the software primitives and abstractions it builds so that agents can use them. When bringing a new engineer onto the team, they're hiring for curiosity and open-mindedness, since the years of experience the field would normally call for don't exist yet. And managers who hadn't written production code in years are back in the codebase, shipping alongside their teams.

Ryan Nystrom runs AI Product Engineering at Notion. In his year-plus tenure, his team has built or touched nearly every AI feature in the product. They’re finding that turning to Codex has unlocked new possibilities for what they can take on.

“What I appreciate about Codex is that it takes its time to figure things out before actually building. The result is that usually what it builds is to our codebase’s standards off the bat, rather than me having to go back and clean up a bunch of its work.”

—Ryan Nystrom, AI Product Engineering, Notion

Building Notion’s AI voice input on the web

Codex’s ability to autonomously execute showed up clearly in a recent project. Ryan exclusively used Codex to bring Notion’s AI voice input to the web.

"When we talk, we can provide so much more context," he says. "If I'm typing, I'm thinking about my prose, what words I'm using. By giving this feature to users on Notion, they're able to ask more organic questions and include a lot more context. We wanted to bring that to Notion AI."

"If I were to build the Notion voice input feature two years ago, this is a project that would've taken me and maybe another engineer two weeks," Ryan says. "With Codex, I was able to build this in maybe three or four hours, entirely by myself."

“It spent a bunch of time exploring our mobile code, and then finally came back and wrote the entire feature basically in one shot. I shipped it the next day and immediately started letting users test it.”

—Ryan Nystrom, AI Product Engineering, Notion