We loved Notion, until the agent era made it feel too slow, closed, and awkward to work with. Treehouse is our attempt to keep the polish of Notion, combine it with the freedom of Dropbox, and make a workspace that humans and AI agents can share properly.
I Love Notion, But It’s Time to Move On
I’ll be honest: I've been a Notion fan through and through for years. Our entire company “life” (every dashboard, every meeting note, every project) lived inside Notion. It was our collective brain, and for a long time, it was the perfect home for us humans.
Our whole life was in Notion, but the agent era changed the game.
The “Agent Era” Frustration
But then the agent era hit. We’re now working with coding agents like Claude Code or Codex every single day, and that’s where the frustration started. Notion is going all-in on their own AI, which is cool, but it feels like a walled garden. You have to use their AI within their patterns.
When we tried to get external agents to work with our data, Notion felt like a bloated bottleneck. The API has painfully slow rate limits, so bulk operations take forever. Plus, the way Notion handles data in “blocks” is just awkward for agents to parse compared to simple files. Our agents were literally tripping up on the architecture.
Introducing Treehouse: The “Notion + Dropbox” Mashup
We wanted that familiar, polished “Notion feel” but without the proprietary bloat that holds agents back. So, we built Treehouse.
The best way to describe it is Notion meets Dropbox.
Treehouse: The UI you're used to, but running on your own files.
Treehouse is a beautiful, web-based viewer for a local folder on your computer. But here's the kicker: that folder is automatically two-way synced across the whole team.
No proprietary database. Just your files on your disk, exactly where they belong.
Freedom for Your Agents
Because your workspace is just a folder on your disk, your AI agents can talk to it directly at lightning speed. No API rate limits or block complexities: just standard Markdown, HTML, and images.
In the video, I show how I can ask Claude to generate a fresh HTML version of our README. The agent creates the file locally, and Treehouse renders it instantly for the whole team to see.
Talking to your workspace via terminal agents is a total game-changer.
The result of the agent's work, rendered instantly in the team's shared view.
Still Polished, Still Yours
Reclaiming your data doesn’t mean sacrificing the aesthetic. We’ve built in advanced theming so you can make the workspace your own (or even have your agent write custom CSS to rebrand it for you!).
Full control over the look and feel, including custom CSS support.
The Summary
Notion was built for a human-only world. In an age where AI agents are doing the heavy lifting, we need a high-speed playground, not a walled garden. Treehouse gives us the best of both: a great interface for the team and total freedom for our agents.
We’re planning to open-source this soon so you can self-host it. If you’re feeling the Notion bloat and want to reclaim your data, let us know what you think!
