06 | Building the Toolbox with Michael Porcelli

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).