[Notion recently announced they're shutting down their mail client.](https://www.notion.com/help/notion-mail-inbox-is-going-away-what-to-do-next) As a goodbye, they pushed users toward Notion Agents as a replacement. Offering a pure AI product where a well-designed interface should have been got me thinking more broadly about how AI tends to get deployed like everything is just a chat. The clearest example I can offer is right inside Notion: formula properties. A formula is a deterministic function — it takes property values as inputs, computes something, spits out an output. It's a real feature, fully exposed, editable. Notion AI lets you take a shortcut using natural language to edit that function. I think that's the right mental model for this kind of case. You describe your intent, it generates the function, you can read it, correct it, edit it manually, own it. The AI is a bridge to a capability that already exists. Natural language is a shortcut to the real thing, and every deterministic thing stays exposed to the user. Notion Agents are the opposite story. You set a trigger, write instructions in natural language, and hand them to an LLM that executes actions in your workspace based on those prompts. What these agents do is often trivially simple: things that could have been handled with a decent UI, or basic webhook-based automations that have existed for years. But now the functional logic is hidden. Nothing is exposed. You're not describing an intent that gets translated into a function or a workflow you can inspect. It's nothing new, just with a worse user experience. When the agent operates, it's executing a deterministic set of actions: creates a new page, fetches the favicon, adds tags, fills the URL property from webhook data. AI only enters where it's actually needed (generating a title, say). At the end of the day, a computer operates on deterministic instructions. Notion has just chosen not to expose them, and charges you more for it. That's the distinction that matters to me: AI as a path toward something deterministic, versus AI as the permanent destination for everything, anything, all the time. When a sad input box becomes the only interface, it's a black box on top of a black box, one that exists mostly to justify a pricing tier and avoid designing a proper UI for a power-user feature. Good AI integration doesn't undermine your control over the software.