If I'm counting correctly, I've written 198 articles about NotebookLM to date. It's the first AI tool that managed to convince me AI has a genuine place in productivity, and it kept getting better with each update. 198 articles later, I finally got to ask the question I've always had: how does the team behind the tool actually use it? While I've written a bunch about my own workflow and even covered a lot of tips from power users over on Reddit and X, I'd never gotten to hear it directly from someone who builds the tool for a living. That changed when I sat down with Michael Chen , a software engineer on the NotebookLM team who works on the Studio panel. His notebook setup is split in two Some are built to last, others are built to learn NotebookLM is centered around, well, creating notebooks. You create a notebook, add sources to it, and then query them or use the Studio panel to turn them into something useful.…