Welcome to my blog

I'm Gabriele. I build things, and I've killed more of them than I've kept.

Who I am

I'm a software engineer and entrepreneur, from Italy, based in Germany. I've spent the last decade writing code and starting companies. Snapgle was a social network for photographers. MateAI used AI to write email campaigns. Some of what I built found users, and some of it I shut down. I've written the code, done the deals, and pulled the plug when the numbers said to.

I ship, I look at what people do with it, and I cut what isn't working, including my own ideas.

Why now

ChatGPT came out less than three months ago. In that time I've watched people who have never written a line of code use it to draft contracts, debug spreadsheets and plan trips, and I've watched developers I respect go from dismissing it to keeping it open all day. Whatever you think of the hype, for the first time a lot of software can be operated by saying what you want in a sentence.

I think that's the most important change in how people use computers since the smartphone, and I want to build in it. Two things follow for me.

The first is the interface. Most software makes you learn its menus before it does anything useful. Photo editors, analytics tools, CRMs: a huge share of the work is translating what you want into where the button is. Language models can do that translation now. Not perfectly, and not for everything, but well enough that I'd rather bet on it than against it. The first thing I'm building on that bet is a photo editor you talk to. More on it in a few days.

The second is size. A small team, sometimes a single developer, can now build things that needed a department a few years ago. That's good for people like me and it's going to make a lot of products cheap to copy. I don't know yet what wins when building is easy, and I want to work it out in the open.

What I'll write about

I'll write about what I'm building, the decisions behind it, what broke and what I changed. When something I try with these models doesn't work, I'll write that up too, because the failures are where most of the useful detail is right now and almost nobody publishes them.

Expect posts when there's something worth saying, not on a schedule.

The rest

Good coffee, honest food, not much else. That's about as personal as this gets.

If any of this is useful, reach out. If you think I'm wrong about something, reach out too.