Notion just admitted agents were drifting

Hey,

Custom Agents are starting to feel a bit more real.

Not perfect. Still easy to overbuild. Still easy to make a mess if you give them too much freedom.

But the direction is getting clearer.

This week, Notion shipped Plan Mode, people are starting to connect the same agent brain across Notion and Claude, and there’s a good discussion around when your workspace stops helping and starts becoming another job.

Let’s get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• Plan Mode makes agents ask before they act

• Why your Notion and Claude setups should share the same brain

• Notion as an app store for agent skills

• When your workspace becomes another thing to manage

3 Tips / Updates

1/ PLAN MODE IS THE BIGGEST AGENT CHANGE OF 2026

Notion shipped Plan Mode for Custom Agents on May 7. Here's what it does.

When you tell an agent to do something complex (rewrite a 40-page doc, bulk-update a database, restructure a project), it now stops and asks clarifying questions first. Then it builds a step-by-step plan and shows you the plan before it touches anything. You approve, it executes. You tweak, it adjusts.

This is Notion admitting that agents were drifting. The first wave of Custom Agents shipped in beta two months ago, teams built 500,000+ of them, and the #1 complaint was "it did something I didn't ask for." Plan Mode is the fix. It's also the right design. Every serious agent product is converging on plan-then-execute.

The 5 minute test for this week: Settings → Mode → Plan to turn it on. Then ask any agent to "reorganize my Tasks database by priority and add a status rollup." You'll see it ask clarifying questions and surface a numbered plan before touching anything. Hit approve. That's the difference.

2/ SAME BRAIN, TWO TOOLS

Most people pick a side. Notion or Claude...

I believe the smarter move is building one system that runs in both.

The architecture is identical in each. Specialist agent modes backed by knowledge bases, a voice profile so neither tool needs rebriefing, and a consistent set of instructions that keep outputs on brand across both.

→ The difference is just where the work happens.

Notion handles anything team-facing and database-driven. Custom agents on a schedule, database auto-fills, structured reporting. Claude handles local files, thinking, and building. The stuff that doesn't fit cleanly into a shared workspace.

The rule before spinning up anything new: would you do this every week if the agent didn't, and does it have a clear return on investment? Both yes, it goes in Notion. Everything else, Claude.

Write your about me and voice profile once in Notion, point Claude at it via the MCP connector, get it to recreate the files locally. Brief the system once. Both tools stay in sync. Neither needs onboarding again every time you switch between them.

Most people's problem isn't the tools. It's building two completely separate systems that don't talk to each other and wondering why everything feels disconnected.

3/ NOTION AS AN APP STORE FOR AGENT SKILLS

Brian Lovin is building something worth watching. A tool that treats a Notion database like an app store for agent skills. Build a skill, install it, and it syncs down to your computer and symlinks across every agent you run. Claude, Codex, whatever else. One source of truth for all of them.

The mental model is the interesting part. Right now most people's agent skills live in random docs, copied prompts, or nowhere at all. This makes them versioned, portable, and centralised in the one place your team already lives. Instead of rebuilding context every time you spin up a new agent, you install it like a plugin.

It's early and rough around the edges. But the direction is right and someone was going to build this eventually.

→ GitHub repo here if you want to follow along or steal the idea.

Poll / From The Community

Someone asked the question most Notion users eventually ask themselves: at what point did your setup go from helpful to another thing to manage?

Beautiful dashboards at the start, linked databases, automations, perfect workflows. Then a few months in, more time spent maintaining the system than using it. Renaming properties breaks things. Old pages pile up. Half the workspace becomes "I'll organize this later."

One side said simplify hard and fast. If you don't open it daily, delete it. Kill half the workspace in an afternoon and never look back. A system that requires maintenance is just another task.

The other side said the problem isn't Notion, it's overbuilding. The setups that survive long term have five or six top level sections max, databases only where something actually needs filtering, and a clear owner for each section. The wiki feature helps too. Assign owners, set verification dates, let pages flag themselves for review instead of going quietly stale.

A few people landed somewhere in the middle: let Claude do the sweeping.

→ The full thread is here if you want to weigh in.

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Quick Links & Tools

Grok now connects to Notion: xAI shipped Grok Connectors on May 6. Grok can now read and write to your Notion workspace. Notable because it makes Notion the default knowledge layer for a non-Notion AI. The reverse-pull worth thinking about: where does Notion AI's moat go if every chatbot can read your workspace?

Notion AI Labs is 1 month in: Notion's community AI-building program just hit the 30-day mark. If you've built a useful agent template, this is the place to share it. Worth checking if you're sitting on something.

Agent Hall of Fame: Notion's official roundup of real Custom Agent templates built by teams running them in production. Good starting point if you're figuring out what to build.