Google's Gemini is getting a feature called "notebooks" to help you organize things about certain topics in a single place while using the AI chatbot, the company announced on Wednesday. You can pull in things like files, past conversations, and custom instructions into notebooks that Gemini can then use as context while you're talking with it.

Notebooks sound a lot like ChatGPT's Projects feature, which launched in 2024 and similarly lets users store things about a certain topic in one spot. Google says to "think of notebooks as personal knowledge bases shared across Google products, starting in Gemini." Gemini's Notebooks also sync with …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Big tech moves today from Microsoft: Longtime executive Julia Liuson is leaving, Neil Barnett is the company’s new chief accessibility officer, and Nanda Ramachandran has been named chief marketing officer for Windows & Devices.

They’re part of a broader wave of executive departures and changes at Microsoft as CEO Satya Nadella looks to flatten the company’s reporting structure and adjust to the new realities of AI in its product development and marketing.

— Liuson is departing after more than 34 years with the Redmond, Wash. tech giant, effective in June, multiple news outlets report.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Liuson has been president since 2021 of Microsoft’s Developer Division, which includes Microsoft Azure services for developers, Visual Studio and the .NET Framework. The division has evolved to integrate with GitHub, which the company acquired in 2018.

Liuson joined Microsoft in 1992 as a software design engineer after graduating from the University of Washington. A company biography states she was the first woman promoted to corporate vice president of development at Microsoft.

A company spokesperson called Liuson’s departure “a thoughtful, planned decision to retire from her full-time role and step into her next chapter,” adding that she will work full-time through June and then transition into an advisory role.

“We’re grateful for the impact Julia and the broader team have delivered for developers and customers, and we’re focused on maintaining momentum as we head into the next fiscal year and beyond. Our developer and AI strategy — and our commitment to customers — remain unchanged,” the spokesperson said.

Liuson will continue reporting to Microsoft CoreAI chief Jay Parikh in her advisory role, The Verge reported, citing an internal memo. A replacement for Liuson has not been publicly named.

Microsoft in recent years has been aggressively recruiting AI leaders from Google DeepMind, Allen Institute for AI, Meta and elsewhere to bolster its AI technologies. That includes Parikh, who joined in 2024 from Lacework and was previously at Meta.

— In his new role, Barnett will lead Microsoft’s accessibility efforts within its Corporate, External & Legal Affairs organization.

Barnett has been with the company since 2001 and 12 years ago became the leader of a team focused on online safety, privacy and accessibility support.

He succeeds Jenny Lay-Flurrie in the role.

“Neil brings a rare combination of unwavering advocacy, strong operational and people leadership combined with clarity, conviction, and purpose,” Lay-Flurrie said on LinkedIn. Over the past decade, he built and scaled the company’s neurodiversity program and Disability Answer Desk, which has supported more than two million customers.

— Lay-Flurrie, who has been with Microsoft for more than 21 years, moved into her new role in February as head of the Trusted Technology Group. This division addresses accessibility, digital safety, privacy, responsible AI, enterprise resilience, and responsible business practices. (See additional GeekWire coverage of Lay-Flurrie’s new role.)

— Ramachandran joins Microsoft from Google, where for the past 12 years he was vice president of Pixel Business, which includes phones, tablets, laptops and other devices. Ramachandran is based in the San Francisco Bay Area and previously held leadership roles at Samsung Mobile and Motorola.

As the new CMO of Windows & Devices, he shared his excitement to build hardware including Microsoft’s Surface computers and growing Windows.

“We are transitioning into the next phase of computing, and helping steer Windows and our devices into the era of the agentic OS is an incredible opportunity,” he said on LinkedIn.

Sahaj Garg, co-founder and CTO of Wispr, a voice-to-text AI that turns speech into polished writing, talks with host Amey Ambade about designing systems for the ambiguity that's inherent in human input (text, voice, multimodal). Sahaj focuses on concrete architectural and training strategies for building robust AI systems. This episode examines the problem of ambiguity, where it shows up, building robust systems, personalization, communicating uncertainty, and evaluation. The conversation starts by exploring the difference between inherent and reducible ambiguity, major categories of ambiguity including lexical, syntactic, and pragmatic, and the additional sources of ambiguity in voice, such as homophones and accents. Garg details how to build systems through model training, including providing additional context and constructing datasets for good annotation. They discuss personalization with a focus on "revealed preferences"—learning from user behavior without explicit feedback—and fighting the problem of AI writing that "regresses to the mean." Finally, they consider how to communicate uncertainty to users without degrading the experience, as well as methods for evaluating ambiguity resolution through offline and online signals.

Julia Liuson is leaving Microsoft. Liuson joined Microsoft in 1992, the same year as CEO Satya Nadella (she worked on Access at first). She helped build the first version of Visual Studio and was the first female corporate vice president at Microsoft. Liuson has been president of Microsoft's Developer Division since 2021. Also, curious about life on the other side of the fence? Paul has a tip for finding games that are optimized for Linux. Plus, Chrome joins the 21st century with vertical tabs and a real reading view. Just be sure to install those anti-tracking extensions.

Windows

• Microsoft promises more native apps for Windows 11, but... which apps? New apps? Replacements for existing apps?
• Thanks for making us revisit the web app vs. native app thing yet again, Microsoft
• Windows 11 version 25H2 is now being pushed to all compatible PCs
• Compatibility milestone, not a big deal because 24H2/25H2 features are identical, same underlying codebase - but some will complain that Microsoft is "forcing" 25H2 on them
• Secure Boot certificate notifications are now available so you can see where your PC is at
• Another month, another emergency Windows Update patch
• New Dev/Beta builds add Xbox Mode, new haptic effects, etc., plus a new Canary build with features we've seen before
• Microsoft is taking the Insider Program on the road
• Component shortages trigger another Raspberry Pi price hike, but also a promise for the future
• The AMD Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition processor will be available from leading retailers starting Apr. 22 with a retail price of $899

AI

• Microsoft's terms of service for Copilot say it's for entertainment purposes only. Yes, really.
• Microsoft AI releases new foundational models for transcription, voice, and images
• Word on iPhone gets Copilot co-create capabilities - used to be AI Mode, you need a Microsoft 365 Copilot subscription
• Anthropic has hired away a key AI executive from Microsoft, and what he has to say about the opportunity is interesting
• Anthropic brings Computer Use to Windows
• Google: Seriously, we are not training AI with your Gmail
• Google AI Pro plans now offer 5 TB of cloud storage, yikes

Xbox & gaming

• Xbox is refreshing the look of achievements on the console
• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, more coming to Game Pass this month
• Was this the best COD ever? In search of greatness
• Also: Forza Horizon 6 launches May 19 and will be available on Xbox Series X|S, Xbox on PC and Xbox Cloud as an Xbox Play Anywhere title, and playable day one with Xbox Game Pass
• Xbox will hold FanFest events around the world

Tips & picks

• Tip of the week: So you want to try gaming on Linux
• App pick of the week: Google Chrome
• RunAs Radio this week: Securing AI Agents with Niall Merrigan
• Brown liquor pick of the week: Corowa Peated Single Barrel 521

Hosts: Leo Laporte, Paul Thurrott, and Richard Campbell

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Marcel Coetzee is a data scientist and AI consultant based in South Africa. With a background in actuarial science and data science, he runs his own consultancy. He also builds SaaS products on the side. His latest project, Hireveld, is a job board tackling South Africa's broken hiring market. He built it entirely with Wasp after trying nearly every other stack out there.

Tell us about yourself. How did you end up building web apps as a Python developer?​

My path has been a bit unconventional. I started in actuarial science, which involves insurance, mathematical statistics and risk modeling. From there I moved into data science, then data engineering, and eventually into building products. Python has been my main language through all of that.

Today I run my own consultancy doing data engineering and AI work. But I've always wanted to build my own things too, so I started learning the JavaScript ecosystem and working on SaaS products on the side. I'm not a JS native by any means, but with the rise of agentic coding tools, I realized I could finally turn my ideas into real full-stack applications without spending years mastering every corner of Node and React.

What's Hireveld, and what problem are you solving?​

Hiring in South Africa is expensive and opaque. Recruitment agencies take a massive cut of annual salary. The established job boards charge thousands of rands just to post a single listing. And too many roles still get filled through personal connections rather than merit.

I built Hireveld to change that. Employers post for free, applicants get ranked anonymously, and employers pay a flat fee to reveal candidates. It's simple, it's cheap, and it puts merit first. The whole thing runs on Wasp - auth, background jobs for expiring old listings, transactional email, payment integration, the works.

You mentioned trying about 10 different stacks before landing on Wasp. What happened?​

Yeah, I went through quite the journey. I started with PocketBase because I liked the idea of owning my code and not being locked into a cloud platform. It's a solid tool, but I quickly realized I needed PostgreSQL for search, background jobs, and a frontend that wasn't stitched together by hand. It just didn't scale to what I was building.

Then I tried Next.js, Nuxt, Svelte - they're decent, but those codebases can grow extremely quickly. As someone who's still relatively new to the JS ecosystem, I'd hit the limits of my knowledge fast. I even tried Django, thinking I'd stick with Python, but it's accumulated so much over the years. Too much magic, too much stuff.

My philosophy is: the projects that succeed expose as few abstractions as possible to the user. I try to keep myself at the highest level of abstraction I can. When I found Wasp on GitHub, the config file clicked for me immediately. You declare what you want - auth, database, jobs, email - and it all works together. I was writing actual product code on day one instead of gluing infrastructure together.

Don't prioritize the important over the urgent. With other stacks I was spending time on infrastructure decisions that felt important but weren't getting me closer to a product. Wasp let me focus on the urgent thing: shipping.

You're a big advocate for agentic coding. How does Wasp fit into that workflow?​

This is where Wasp really shines, and honestly I think more people need to know about it. I've been building Hireveld almost entirely through agentic coding - Claude Code in the terminal - and after trying 10 different things, Wasp is by far the best experience for AI-assisted development.

Here's why: context is the precious commodity. Every line of code in your project takes a chunk of the model's context window. Wasp keeps the codebase tight and small.

The .wasp config file means the AI can understand your entire app's architecture at a glance - your routes, your auth setup, your jobs, your entities. Instead of the agent crawling through hundreds of files trying to figure out how things connect, it's all declared in one place. And because Wasp is opinionated and constrained, the agent doesn't try to do 50 different things. When something is wrong, the compiler screams. That tight feedback loop is exactly what agentic coding needs.

Wasp respects the model's context length. It keeps things tidy. The constraint is the feature - it's what keeps both you and the AI from spiraling into a 20,000-line mess.

I should say - I'm not blindly vibe coding. I know where my files are, I know my routes, I hand-edit the main.wasp file when I need to. I take testing seriously, both e2e and unit tests. QA is the layer where you, the human, decide what you actually want to build. But Wasp gives me the structure to stay at a high level and be productive, even as someone whose main language is Python. Also bring my data science background to bear by simulating data to gauge how the system would react to real traffic.

You also contributed back to Wasp - tell us about the Microsoft Auth integration.​

Hireveld targets the South African enterprise market, and enterprises run on Microsoft. They need Entra ID (Azure AD) for single sign-on - it's non-negotiable. When I started building, Wasp didn't have a Microsoft OAuth provider. With most frameworks, that would mean either paying a fortune for a third-party service or building a fragile custom integration that becomes tech debt.

But Wasp's codebase is approachable enough that I could build the provider myself and contribute it back. The PR process was great - Carlos and the team were welcoming and helpful. That's the sweet spot I was looking for: a framework that's batteries-included enough that I'm not rebuilding auth from scratch, but open enough that when I need something custom, I can add it without fighting the framework.

The community in general has been one of the best parts. The developers are genuinely friendly, my contributions felt valued, and I can tell the team takes agentic coding seriously - they maintain a Claude Code skill, they keep their prompts updated, they engage with the tooling ecosystem. That's an unusual level of involvement for a framework team.

What would you say to a developer considering Wasp for their next project?​

If you're building a full-stack web app in 2026 and you're using AI tools to code - which you should be - try Wasp. Seriously. I went through PocketBase, Next.js, Nuxt, Svelte, Django, and more. Wasp is the only one where I felt like I was building my product from day one instead of fighting my tools.

It gave me auth, type-safe full-stack operations, background jobs, and transactional email - all wired together from a single config file. Everything else - the ranking algorithm, payments, file storage - I built on top of what Wasp provided. That separation is what made it possible to ship as a solo developer.

And if you're coming from Python or another ecosystem and you're intimidated by the JavaScript world - don't be. Wasp abstracts away enough of the complexity that you can stay at a high level and be productive. I'm proof of that.

Wasp is the full-stack framework for the agentic era. It's the one that lets you focus on what you're building, not how you're building it.

Marcel Coetzee is a data scientist, AI consultant, and SaaS builder based in South Africa. You can find him on GitHub and reach out to him on coetzee.marcel2@gmail.com