In today's episode, we speak with Michael Porcelli, founder of Metarelating, about the software he's been building for himself—not for other people, just for his own life. A former techie who left the field two decades ago, Michael walks us through three projects born out of ordinary domestic problems: a receipt splitter that divides a mile-long Costco bill item by item, a ledger that tracks his siblings' equity in an inherited house, and a database of his late father's 75,000-baseball card collection. Along the way we get into why he emphatically does not want to turn any of this into a product, the "four P's" framework for software (perishable, personal, public, and professional), and why having an AI agent is like having a personal handyman with a truck full of tools living in your back yard (and why sometimes, you still need to call a real structural engineer).In today's episode, we speak with Michael Porcelli, founder of Metarelating, about the software he's been building for himself—not for other people, just for his own life. A former techie who left the field two decades ago, Michael walks us through three projects born out of ordinary domestic problems: a receipt splitter that divides a mile-long Costco bill item by item, a ledger that tracks his siblings' equity in an inherited house, and a database of his late father's 75,000-baseball card collection. Along the way we get into why he emphatically does not want to turn any of this into a product, the "four P's" framework for software (perishable, personal, public, and professional), and why having an AI agent is like having a personal handyman with a truck full of tools living in your back yard (and why sometimes, you still need to call a real structural engineer).
