The best Notion tip this week wasn't from Notion

Hey,

Notion put out eight small updates this week that add up to more than the "2% better" framing suggests. Agents can now suggest edits instead of just making them. And the most useful tip this week didn't come from Notion at all, it came from a user buried in the replies.

One more thing before we get into it: if you built anything on Notion's old agent APIs, the private alpha routes get cut off September 30. That's 29 days from today.

Let's get into it.

- Nick

In Today's Email 👀

• 8 small things that actually add up

• Agents can now suggest edits

• The real tip that didn't come from Notion

• Plus: is your Notion setup a graveyard?

3 Tips / Updates

1/ EIGHT SMALL THINGS THAT ADD UP

Notion put out a batch of tiny updates this week under the banner of making things "2% better," and for once that's actually underselling it a bit.

The model picker finally groups by provider with favorites pinned up top, so you're not scrolling past six models you've never touched to find the one you actually use. Right next to it sits a new effort control, basically a dial for how hard you want the AI to think before it answers, tucked into Advanced settings for Custom Agents and sitting right next to the picker for your Personal Agent.

The bigger shift is how much easier it's gotten to hand agents real context. Share a page with a Custom Agent the same way you'd add a teammate, paste an agent link into any page and it shows up as a working chat box, and if you've got a prompt that only lives in your head or buried in an old doc somewhere, you can just talk it through with Notion Agent and turn it into an actual skill the rest of the team can use.

Meeting notes got quietly smarter too. An agent can now kick off the second a summary finishes, so the recap, the project update, or whatever comes next starts without anyone having to remember to trigger it.

And for the more technical crowd, Custom Agents now have a public API, so one can get wired into a Slack bot, a help center, or wherever else it's needed outside Notion. Paired with a new usage view under Settings, so you can finally see where your AI allowance is actually going instead of guessing.

2/ AGENTS CAN NOW SUGGEST EDITS INSTEAD OF STEAMROLLING YOUR PAGES

Notion shipped "suggested edits" for agents on August 28.

Ask your agent to suggest edits and instead of rewriting your page live, it queues up line-level changes for you to review top to bottom. Built for the stuff you don't want to hand over blind: grammar passes, style cleanup, small fixes where you want final say before anything sticks.

This is Notion admitting that letting agents edit pages directly was too risky for how people actually use them. Suggestion mode is the seatbelt they should've shipped from day one.

Worth trying on a page you don't fully trust an agent with yet, a grammar or clarity pass where you actually want to see every change before it sticks rather than finding out after the fact.

3/ THE REAL TIP THIS WEEK ISN'T FROM NOTION, IT'S FROM A USER

Buried in the replies to Notion's own "8 tiny things" thread was the actually useful pattern this week: how someone multitasks with a coding agent using a Notion database as its memory.

Have your coding agent log progress, blockers, and notes to a Notion database as it works, instead of leaving all of that buried in a chat thread you'll never scroll back through. Throw new tasks at it manually, or pipe them in automatically from email, Sentry, GitHub, wherever they tend to show up, and let it kick off a session to build or fix from there. Lose track of an older task later in the week, and instead of digging through chat history, you just ask the agent to find the right page in Notion and catch you up. Wire in the Notion MCP and even the logging happens on its own.

Small habit change, but it turns a coding agent from something you have to keep track of into something that keeps track of itself.

From The Community

Almost everyone who's spent real time in Notion has built the same thing at some point: a personal setup with habits, goals, a journal, maybe a whole life dashboard, put together during a burst of motivation on a random evening.

The interesting question isn't whether people build these, it's what happens to them a few months later. Some genuinely stick, quietly running in the background for years. Others turn into a kind of digital graveyard, still sitting there, fully built, just never opened anymore.

Quick Links & Tools

Agent API migration deadline is September 30 → Private alpha agent/thread/message routes get cut off with no graceful shutdown. Move to the new public beta Agent APIs (session-based, JSON bodies) via the "Upgrading to public beta" doc.

Turn a chat into a reusable skill → Chat with Notion Agent to build a skill from scratch, so know-how that usually lives in one person's head, or a stray doc, becomes something the whole team can reuse.

Smart scheduling in Notion Calendar → Add people to a new event and Notion recommends times that work for everyone. Replies are already asking if it's AI-gated and how it actually sees other people's availability. Worth testing before you trust it blind.