Notion 3.5 Update: Workers, Agents & Everything New You Need to Know

Notion's 3.5 update is one of the most significant releases in a while, introducing the Developer Platform and Notion Workers alongside a handful of smaller improvements that are easy to miss. Whether you're a consultant, a business owner, or just someone who lives in Notion, this update has something worth knowing about. Here's a clear breakdown of everything that's new.

What Is the Notion Developer Platform?

In simple terms, the Notion Developer Platform is Notion's official toolkit that lets developers build apps, automations, and integrations that connect with Notion more deeply than ever before. As part of the 3.5 update, this platform introduced Notion Workers and a new CLI (command-line interface) for developers who want to build and manage integrations directly from their terminal.

If you're not a developer, you can still benefit from what others build. And if you're curious about building your own, AI tools can help you plan workflows or even assist with setup.

For the full technical documentation, Notion's official developer website is your best resource. https://www.notion.com/product/dev

What Are Notion Workers?

Notion Workers are small automations that run on Notion's own servers. Unlike third-party tools like Make or Zapier, Workers live natively inside Notion. They can:

• Receive incoming data from other tools via webhooks and write it into a Notion database
• Sync live data from external sources (like APIs) into your database properties
• Power tools that a Notion custom agent can use to retrieve precise, real-time information

You can find your Workers in Settings → Workers, where you can enable, disable, pause, or delete them. You can also control who in your workspace has permission to create Workers which makes it easy to roll them out for client workspaces too.

One important thing to note: starting August 11th, Workers will use Notion credits, similar to how custom agents work. From testing, they use very few credits, so they may actually help keep your overall credit usage lower by reducing what your custom agents need to look up.

Smaller Updates Worth Knowing About

Beyond the 3.5 release, here's a roundup of smaller Notion updates that are genuinely useful:

Merge Cells in Simple Tables

You can now select multiple cells in a simple table, right-click, and choose Merge cells. This opens up a lot more formatting flexibility. You can color merged cells differently, create header-style rows, and build more visually organized tables. Unmerge just as easily from the same menu.

Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs now show how many pages are nested inside each level and you can navigate to any nested page. It's a small change that makes it much easier to understand how your workspace is structured at a glance.

Customizable Database Tabs

You can now right-click a database view tab and choose how it displays: text only, icon only, or text and icon. A nice touch for keeping your workspace clean and organized.

Mute Discussion Replies

If you're getting too many notifications from comment threads, you can now click Mute replies on any comment to stop receiving notifications for that discussion.

Expanded Cover Photo Gallery

Notion's default cover photo gallery has grown significantly. If you frequently create pages and want a quick cover image, there are now many more options to choose from without needing to upload your own.

Mail & Calendar in Settings

Notion Mail and Notion Calendar now appear directly in your main Settings page, so you can see which email addresses and calendars are connected to your workspace without navigating elsewhere.

Rollups Now Support Number Formats

Rollup properties can now display formatted numbers like currency, percentages, and more. If you were using a workaround formula to display a dollar amount from a rollup, you can now set the format directly on the rollup property itself.

 

Custom Agent Updates

Custom agents moved out of the trial phase earlier this month and are now credit-based. Here's a summary of the key updates:

• Admin controls: Go to Settings → Notion AI → Agents to see all your agents and control who can create them.
• Credit limits: In the dashboard, you can set a credit limit per agent to avoid unexpected usage.
• Agent library: There's now a dedicated agent section in your library, with a favorites view and a full list of your created agents.
• Slack integration: Agents can now connect to Slack, including private channels.
• Insights tab: View credits used, total runs, completion rate, active users, and more, a big improvement over the old recent chats view.
• AI Autofill with custom agents: You can now set a custom agent as the AI autofill source for a database property. Unlike basic autofill, you can give it custom instructions, connect it to the web, and set it to run on a recurring schedule, weekly, monthly, or on whatever cycle fits your workflow.

Notion Agent Updates

Beyond custom agents, Notion's personal AI assistant (the one you access via chat or the sidebar) also picked up several new features worth knowing about.

Voice input is now available. You can click the microphone icon and speak your request directly instead of typing, great for quick tasks like adding something to a database or capturing a note on the fly.

Share your chat. If you get a useful response from Notion AI, you can now generate a share link and send the conversation results to someone else. This is handy for sharing research or summaries with teammates.

Calendar scheduling. Notion AI can now schedule events directly onto your calendar. Just ask it to block time for a meeting and it will create the event for you, which then appears in Notion Calendar.

Plan mode. This is perhaps the most significant update. There is now a Plan mode in Notion AI settings that lets the agent draft a full plan before executing any changes. So if you ask it to build something complex, like a three-month project planner with tasks, a calendar, and database views, it shows you the proposed architecture first. You review and approve, then it builds everything. This is a big improvement for anyone who wants to stay in control of what gets created without going back and forth through multiple prompts.

Final Thoughts

The 3.5 update represents a meaningful expansion of what Notion can do for those who want to pull in external data, reduce credit usage, or build more powerful automations without leaving Notion. And even if you're not ready to dive into Workers just yet, the smaller updates across tables, breadcrumbs, rollups, and agents make the day-to-day experience noticeably better.

Watch the video walkthrough below: