Boost AI Agents: Recursive Fetching For Notion Pages

by SLV Team 53 views

Level Up AI Agent Efficiency with Recursive Page Fetching

Level Up AI Agent Efficiency with Recursive Page Fetching

Hey guys, let's talk about making AI agents work smarter, not harder, especially when they're dealing with Notion pages. Right now, if an AI agent needs to grab a Notion page with all its bells and whistles – columns, toggles, callouts, and all that jazz – it has to make a bunch of separate calls. Think of it like this: the agent has to ask for the page, then ask for what's inside the page, then what's inside the columns, and so on. This process, however, can be significantly improved.

The Current Problem: Many API Calls

So, here's the deal: to get a complete Notion page, the agent currently needs to make several calls using the Notion CLI. For instance, getting a single page might require six different calls. Let's break it down:

  • Call 1: Get page metadata.
  • Call 2: Get top-level blocks.
  • Call 3: Get column 1 content.
  • Call 4: Get column 2 content.
  • Call 5: Get toggle content.
  • Call 6: (And it keeps going for each nested element...)

As you can imagine, this can quickly become a real drag, especially with more complex pages. But that's not all; this process has several impacts on the AI Agents.

The Impact: Token Overhead, Latency, and Reliability

Each of these calls adds overhead, with each CLI call adding roughly 250 tokens (think of these as units of context). For a simple nested page, the number of tokens can be as high as 3500 (2000 for data and 1500 for overhead). But what if the agent only had to use 2250 tokens (2000 for data and 250 for overhead)? The potential savings are significant, around 35% in context reduction.

Furthermore, these sequential API calls mean the agent has to wait for each response before asking for the next piece of information. This causes increased latency. A page that takes six calls will take six times longer to retrieve than if it could be fetched in one go. Moreover, the more calls there are, the more chances there are for things to go wrong. Each call could time out, hit rate limits, or fail independently, making the whole process less reliable.

The Solution: Implement Recursive Page Fetching

Here’s a way to fix this, my friends! The proposed solution is to add a --recursive (or --deep) flag to the page retrieve and block retrieve children commands. This would allow the agent to fetch the entire block tree in one fell swoop. Think of it like a superpower that enables the agent to grab everything at once.

Examples: One Command to Rule Them All

With this new flag, the commands would look something like this:

  • notion-cli page retrieve <PAGE_ID> --recursive -r: Get the entire page tree in one call.
  • notion-cli block retrieve children <BLOCK_ID> --recursive -r: Get all nested blocks under a specific block.

Expected Output: A Clean, Complete JSON

The expected output would be a neatly structured JSON object containing all the page data, including nested blocks. This would provide a complete picture of the page's structure and content in a single response. This would mean that instead of needing to make multiple calls, the agent only needs to make one.

{
  "object": "page",
  "id": "...",
  "properties": {...},
  "blocks": [
    {
      "id": "...",
      "type": "column_list",
      "children": [
        {
          "id": "...",
          "type": "column",
          "children": [
            {
              "id": "...",
              "type": "to_do",
              "to_do": {...}
            }
          ]
        }
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Inspired by GitHub CLI: A Pattern for Success

GitHub CLI provides a great example of how to handle nested data effectively. For instance, the gh pr view command returns all the details of a pull request, including comments, reviews, and checks, in a single response. This is exactly what we want to achieve with our recursive fetching.

Bonus Enhancement: Unsupported Block Warnings

While we're at it, let's make things even better. We could also add warnings for unsupported blocks, like transcription blocks, that the Notion API doesn't expose. This would help the AI agents understand what content is there but inaccessible via the API. Here is an example of what that might look like:

{
  "blocks": [...],
  "warnings": [
    {
      "block_id": "29379d4c-71bb-8076-a6b3-fe434216dd8b",
      "type": "unsupported",
      "notion_type": "transcription",
      "message": "Block type 'transcription' not supported by Notion API",
      "has_children": true
    }
  ]
}

The Benefits: Why This Matters

Implementing recursive fetching offers several key benefits:

  • Significant Token Reduction: Enjoy a 35% reduction in tokens for nested pages. That means less overhead and faster processing.
  • Faster Execution: Get the data faster by making just one API call instead of multiple ones.
  • Improved Reliability: Fewer calls mean fewer points of failure, making the process more dependable.
  • Enhanced User Experience: AI agents get complete data immediately, improving their performance and usability.
  • Increased Visibility: Warnings highlight what is blocked by the Notion API, allowing for better content management and understanding.

By adding this feature, we're not just improving the performance of the AI agents, we're making them more efficient, more reliable, and more user-friendly. It’s a win-win for everyone involved!