Ask HN: Leaving Notion, Codebase as a Wiki?
I was talking to some friends (2 founders, old coworkers of mine) where I learned they check in EVERYTHING into their codebase. Not just plan.md files or implementation details, but investor_meeting.md, user_feedback.md, growth_strategy.md, TODOs.md, and more
They do this because even though they could just use these AI-powered SaaS productivity suites like Notion, Linear, etc,. it's way way simpler to just dump stuff into the codebase, let Git handle the collaboration aspect, and let Opus/Sonnet + Claude Code retrieve info and manage it.
this got me thinking, highly collaborative teams are spending more and more of their work day in AI coding tools. i'd bet a lot of them have custom approaches that let them collaborate even on non-coding stuff.
- Some people are still all-in on Granola, Notion, Linear MCP etc. - Others like wrangling .md files in git - I have friends that run a script that syncs local memory files to their teammates whenever their CC edits them locally. - And still others hate this idea and want to use the established players
this was really interesting to me, so i thought i'd ask here -- if you're deep in AI coding land, how do you collaborate w/ your team? do you have hacks and custom workflows? what kind of team are you? Alternatively -- if you don't use these tools like this and use them just for projects/code -- how do you work with others?
I’ve been through this exact loop.
Notion is great, but for day to day work it quickly turns into “build your own system”. Databases, relations, workflows… and you end up maintaining the tool instead of using it.
We also tried the opposite with everything in markdown and git. It works well with AI tools, but collaboration becomes painful fast, especially for comments and async feedback.
What worked best for us was splitting it:
- codebase for technical stuff - a lightweight PM tool for task flow - Notion for docs
We use FlowBoard (flowboard.dev) for the PM part. It’s basically one prioritized list and continuous flow, no setup.
Full disclosure: I'm the founder of FlowBoard, so obviously biased. But the core advice stands — if Notion feels like overkill for project management, it probably is, and a purpose-built tool will save you time.
I find it is now 1000x more effective to draft documents in collaboration with Claude, working with a markdown file as the output format.
However, git doesn't work in my team as a document collaboration mechanism - the commenting and discussion on a file has so much more friction that Google Docs or Notion.
What I've ended up on is a workflow where I iterate on the doc until I am satisfied, then export it to notion (via MCP) and publish that for feedback. Once there is consensus on the notion doc, that becomes the artifact of record.
It's a suboptimal solution, though - claude makes a number of poor design choices when exporting .md -> notion.
That was my plan 10 years ago when LLMs were not available yet but I knew a system was possible that could do that and was thinking about bootstrapping it.
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