sync-guide

A guide to building Notion Workers syncs, which are recurring programs that copy records and changes into a Notion database. It explains full backfills, ongoing updates, pagination, rate limits, consistency delays, and deletion handling.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when designing a sync architecture, choosing between replacing all data and applying changes, handling large APIs, or planning cursors and deletion strategies.
Why use it?
It helps avoid common data-sync problems such as missing records, duplicate records, API limits, and deleted items remaining in Notion.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/colebemis/notion-workers/sync-guide
Any agent
npx skills add colebemis/notion-workers --skill sync-guide
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/colebemis/notion-workers

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Per session 53 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,844 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
Origin 95% copy Near-identical to another mod in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00053 $0.02844
Opus 5 $0.00026 $0.01422
Sonnet 5 $0.00011 $0.00569
Haiku 4.5 $0.00005 $0.00284

Measured 3d ago against content hash 100051ec8bb3, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

sync-guide scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 3d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 5 executable files (examples/incremental-basic.ts, examples/incremental-bimodal.ts, examples/incremental-events.ts, …), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

This is a copy

95% identical to sync-guide — 149 lines differ, which has more behind it and is treated as the original. This page carries a canonical link to it rather than competing with it.

.agents/skills/sync-guide/SKILL.md · 254 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 254 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

What is a Sync?

A sync is a recurring execute function that returns data changes to populate a Notion database. The runtime calls execute in a loop:

const db = worker.database("myDb", {
  type: "managed",
  initialTitle: "My Data",
  primaryKeyProperty: "ID",
  schema: {
    properties: {
      Name: Schema.title(),
      ID: Schema.richText(),
    },
  },
});

worker.sync("mySync", {
  database: db,
  execute: async (state, { notion }) => ({
    changes: [
      { type: "upsert", key: "1", properties: { Name: Builder.title("Item 1"), ID: Builder.richText("1") } },
    ],
    hasMore: false,
    nextState: undefined,
  }),
});

Each call returns { changes, hasMore, nextState }. If hasMore is true, the runtime calls execute again with nextState. This continues until hasMore is false, completing a cycle. The next cycle begins at the scheduled interval with the state from the end of the previous cycle.

Imports:

import { Worker } from "@notionhq/workers";
import * as Builder from "@notionhq/workers/builder";
import * as Schema from "@notionhq/workers/schema";

Decision Framework

Step 1: Choose an Architecture

The deciding factor is API capability and dataset size. Two tiers:

Condition Architecture
Small source (<1k records) or API with no change tracking Simple replace sync — one sync, mode: "replace"
Everything else (API supports updated_at, change feeds, events) Backfill + delta pair — two syncs writing to the same database

Simple replace sync: One sync returns the full dataset each cycle. After the final hasMore: false, any records not seen are deleted automatically. Use when the dataset is small enough to re-fetch entirely.

Backfill + delta pair: Two syncs share a single database. The backfill sync (mode: "replace", schedule: "manual") re-fetches everything when triggered. The delta sync (mode: "incremental", frequent schedule) fetches only changes since the last run. This separates concerns cleanly — no bi-modal state machine, no backfill-to-delta transition bugs.

Read the full file on GitHub · 254 lines

Files

What ships with it

6 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 3d ago First seen · 254 lines · 53 tokens per session scan A 100051ec8bb3

Subscribe to this mod's changes

sync-guide is a skill published in the GitHub repository colebemis/notion-workers (126 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 53 tokens to every session and 2,844 once invoked, about $0.0003 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. It is 95% identical to sync-guide, differing in 149 lines, and is treated as a copy.

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