The Rise of Malleable Software 🧩 — with Geoffrey Litt

Today's guest is Geoffrey Litt, Design Engineer at Notion. With Geoffrey, we talked about malleable software, a type of platform that kind of always existed, but is now getting new meaning and opportunity thanks to AI. And then we talked about how Notion itself changed its place in the ecosystem, with the AI agents first, and now with the new developer platform, where you can ship code directly inside Notion. And finally, we talked about how Notion builds Notion, design as shipping code to production, internal prototyping, feature flags, and more. (00:00) Episode start (01:09) Introducing Geoffrey Litt (01:41) Malleable software (05:20) Sponsor break (06:54) The nightmare bycicle analogy (09:39) Teach users just in time (13:58) How Notion exposes structure (17:24) Vibe coding vs platforms (19:01) Notion's shift from walled garden to developer hub (20:40) Bringing external coding agents into Notion (26:26) The accountants analogy: why more productivity creates more jobs (33:13) Trust and oversight: AI agents (40:15) How design engineers ship to production daily at Notion (47:22) Prototyping in code - Today's episode is brought to you by Unblocked. Unblocked is the context layer for modern engineering teams. Get a free three-week trial at https://getunblocked.com/refactoring - You can also find this at: • 📬 Newsletter: https://refactoring.fm • 🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7Luds9d... • 📱 Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast... — For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, or appearing as a guest, email: [email protected]