How Notion uses Codex to one-shot specs and multiply its engineering power.

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.

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."

When the feature request came in, Notion's mobile app already had a functional version, but the desktop and web client didn't. Even though Ryan wasn't entirely sure how the feature worked on mobile, he was able to give the problem to Codex. He pointed it at the mobile codebase, gave it a clear description of how it would need to look on the web, and provided a way to verify the result.

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