Leela Aravind Karlapudi

I grew up around computers and studied computer science and engineering in Tirupati, finishing my Bachelor of Technology in 2024. That September I moved to the UK for a masters in Artificial Intelligence at Liverpool John Moores University, and finished it in September 2025.

What I took from the degree was less about models than about scepticism — the habit of asking what a result actually shows, and whether the comparison behind it was fair. That turns out to matter more than any particular architecture, and it shows up in almost everything I have built since.

AI is the reason I can build at this pace. It is a genuinely good tool for turning an idea into something testable quickly. It is not a reason to trust the output, and I have tried to design each product so that the machine’s confidence is never the thing a person has to rely on.

Starting in June 2026

I began building websites properly in June 2026. The first was a shift pay calculator I wrote for myself, and it taught me the lesson the rest of this year kept repeating: the calculation is the easy part. Everything after it — hosting, error states, mobile, responsibility for a wrong answer — is the actual work.

That first calculator became a collection of sixteen. The rest of the network grew out of problems I hit while building, not from a plan.

What I did not expect to have to learn

Design, in the sense of hierarchy rather than decoration. Privacy and data protection, properly rather than by instinct. Accessibility, which is nearly free to build in and miserable to retrofit. Security. Cost control, because every product here has to run on a budget one person’s wage can absorb. And quality judgement — knowing when something correct is still not good enough, which is the one I have found hardest.

The data protection lesson

I had assumed that if I designed carefully enough — processing files in the browser, collecting almost nothing — the legal obligations would mostly not reach me. That was wrong in an instructive way. Good design reduces risk; it does not decide whether an obligation applies to you.

So I stopped reasoning about it and found out. The registration process applied, I completed it, and I paid the data protection fee. That does not make ITISYOU “fully compliant” and I do not describe it that way anywhere — registration is a requirement met, not a standard achieved. I wrote about what it changed.

Refusing work that technically succeeded

The decisions I am most confident about are the ones where I threw something away. Space had a cinematic entry sequence that was built and working; the quality was not good enough, so it is gone, and it is not listed as a feature anywhere on this site.

ATSYou is the larger version of that call. The generator produces documents in which every line traces back to a claim the user confirmed. It works. It is still not open to customers, because the editorial and layout quality was not good enough to charge for. That was the hardest decision on the project.

Where I am now

Still in Chester, and still building. Currently working as a supermarket service colleague while developing ITISYOU and seeking a full-time UK role in AI, software or related engineering. ITISYOU is continuing work rather than a finished story, and this site is written to be readable as exactly that.