Notion as Primitive RAG for ChatGPT
TL;DR Notion is my shared memory for ChatGPT. I keep a single, simple table of pages with clear titles and short summaries, so the assistant can pull the right page, use it to answer, and show me the source. I add something once and every future chat can reuse it, so ideas stay connected across projects without me reexplaining things. How it works, with examples Structure. There is one master database. Titles are slugged in lowercase with hyphens. Each page has natural language aliases and a short description of three sentences placed directly under the title. There is a status field for draft, evergreen, or archive, a last reviewed date, a single collection, a single function, and whatever tags are useful. Because the aliases and descriptions are written the way a person would search, recall is predictable without semantic search. Example [USER]: You know how we talked about cars from 1993, spin up a notion note on that. Expected behavior: the assistant returns a paste ready Markdown block that follows the master parsing guide, with the slug "cars-from-1993", status set to draft, a sensible collection and function based on context, six to twelve aliases, three to six tags, the three sentence description under the title, a minimal content scaffold, a see also section, and an initial updates line. Modes. The assistant uses two gears. Quick search is for speed. It matches on alias and description, gives a small preference to evergreen pages, opens the top note, and if confidence is not high it glances at a neighbor before answering. Deep search is for precision. It filters by collection, function, and tag, includes date filters if I specify them, prefers evergreen pages, sorts by last reviewed, then reads the best one or two before answering. This is simple enough to be consistent and strict enough to be reliable. Example, quick search [USER]: Search for "aws iam" in Notion Expected behavior: the assistant opens the most relevant evergreen IAM note (and one neighbor if needed), then answers strictly from those pages with inline links back to those notes.