AI agents are turning apps into features, not products
The main topic of this article is how growing AI agent adoption is driving software product discontinuation by shifting user behavior away from specialist tools and toward integrated, automated workflows that run inside existing platforms rather than in separate apps. This change is visible in email and developer tooling, where capable agents now perform tasks that once justified dedicated products, causing companies to retire under-used clients and niche plugins while folding their value into broader AI-first experiences. Notion Mail and Kotlin Notebook are not isolated casualties; they are early examples of a wider pattern in which automation quietly erodes the need for standalone interfaces.
When software stops being the place where work happens, its days are numbered. That is the uncomfortable lesson behind the Notion Mail shutdown and JetBrains’ decision to sunset Kotlin Notebook. In both cases, the companies did not kill weak experiments so much as admit that their users had already moved on. Email triage and code exploration now happen through AI agents intertwined with larger ecosystems, not inside polished but isolated tools. The message to product teams is blunt: if an AI workflow can bypass your app, your app is at risk.
Notion Mail: when more than half your users stop opening the inbox
Notion’s decision to shut down its AI-powered Gmail client, Notion Mail, on September 22 is a textbook case of an agent cannibalizing its host product. The company openly explains the trigger: “As Notion agents have gotten more capable, we’ve seen more users hand off email workflows to them… Today, more than half of Notion Mail users manage emails without ever opening their inbox.” Once an AI agent can read, sort, and respond to messages on your behalf, the dedicated inbox starts to look like ornamental UI.
The practical impact on users is annoyingly specific rather than catastrophic. All Gmail messages remain intact, but drafts and scheduled emails will vanish unless saved first. Custom views and sorting built inside Notion Mail do not transfer, attachments in snippets must be downloaded by hand, and reminders tied to Notion Mail won’t follow you back to Gmail. HIPAA-covered customers face an even sharper deadline, having to transition off the service by June 30, ahead of the general September end date. In other words, the email itself survives, but the productivity scaffolding around it is disposable—and that is exactly how Notion now seems to see the client.
Kotlin Notebook: AI and the limits of forcing notebook culture on developers
On the developer tools side, JetBrains announced it is sunsetting Kotlin Notebook, the interactive coding plugin first launched in July 2023. Starting with IntelliJ IDEA 2026.2, Kotlin Notebook will be unbundled and handed to the open-source community under the Apache 2.0 license, and JetBrains will publish no compatible version for 2026.3 and beyond, creating an immediate compatibility cliff for anyone who wants to maintain it. Marco Behler, head of the JVM ecosystem, is blunt about why: “Kotlin Notebook didn’t reach the level of adoption we expected.”
JetBrains points to a broader shift: “AI tools have changed how developers explore code, prototype, and iterate, and many of the workflows that originally drove notebook adoption have evolved along with that shift.” This matters because Kotlin Notebook was built on the Jupyter format—a standard born in the Python and data science world, where notebooks are part of daily working culture. Outside that culture, notebook plugins for Kotlin or C# have struggled. Microsoft’s quiet deprecation of its Polyglot Notebooks extension for VS Code, despite 1.8 million installs and strong ratings, underscored the same reality: neither community embraced notebooks the way Python users did, and both vendors have used AI as the exit ramp from these niche tools.
AI automation is consolidating tools around platforms that still matter
What ties Notion Mail and Kotlin Notebook together is not just software product discontinuation, but who inherits their use cases. In email, Notion is “going all in on using agents to run your inbox” instead of maintaining a parallel Gmail client. In development, JetBrains is not betting on more plugins but on AI-native coding tools and its own Mellum2 model, as traditional IDEs face pressure from conversational, agent-driven workflows. Specialized tools are being stripped down to their core value and folded back into larger platforms where agents can act without exposing extra UI.
At the same time, established environments that genuinely anchor work are thriving. Jupyter Notebook usage grew 75% year-over-year, from 1.4 million to 2.42 million repositories on GitHub, with over 400,000 AI-tagged projects using Jupyter for experiments. That is not a market being killed by AI; it is a market where AI lives. Google Colab has taken the same approach, baking agentic capabilities directly into a Python-first notebook rather than treating AI as a reason to abandon it. The pattern is clear: AI does not eliminate tools; it eliminates weak surfaces and reinforces strong ones.
Conclusion: if your product can be bypassed, it can be discontinued
Notion Mail and Kotlin Notebook were discontinued not because email or notebooks are obsolete, but because their specific interfaces became optional in an AI-first world. When more than half of your users never open the inbox, or when developers prefer AI-assisted exploration inside their existing environment, your standalone client or plugin becomes a maintenance burden rather than a growth engine.
For users, the shift is bittersweet: convenience improves as agents take over, but favorite tools can vanish with little warning. For product builders, the lesson is harsh. AI agents and automation are becoming the default layer where work is delegated. If your software cannot offer a place where humans still meaningfully interact—or if its core value could be absorbed into a platform like Jupyter or a general IDE—then it risks joining Notion Mail and Kotlin Notebook on the discontinuation list. In the age of AI agents, survival belongs to products that remain the stage, not just the backstage.
