Pragyan Dahal.

Software, systems & the built world

The physical world should be easier to build.

I'm interested in how we could make housing and infrastructure cheaper and easier to build. Software is part of that, but I want to understand the physical work too.

Pragyan DahalFirst year at Stanford
A repeatable structure, a particular place An exploded drawing of a building. A roof, frame and foundation need to be assembled on a site, unlike copies of a digital file. DESIGNASSEMBLYSITE A PARTICULAR PLACE
Writing & experiments · October 2026Read on
Where I'm starting

What makes construction slow and expensive, and which parts could we change?

I'm exploring EE and CS, along with construction, manufacturing, and automation. I don't have a solution in mind yet, I'm trying to understand how the process works.

A little about me
Selected writing

Stuff I'm trying to figure out

I'm using these drafts to write down what I currently think and what I still need to understand.

Draft3 min read

Things Worth Building

I picked Khaaloop because I thought it could be a good business. I should have thought more about whether I wanted to work on food surplus.

entrepreneurshipKhaaloopjudgment
Draft2 min read

Default Choices

I tend to ask why we're doing something a particular way. The answer is sometimes a good reason I hadn't understood yet.

systemsincentivesdesign
All writing
Selected projects

Things I've tried

A surplus-food marketplace and a local voice system. I wrote up what happened with each.

01
hasn't worked commercially yet

Khaaloop

Surplus-food reservation flowA merchant listing connects to a reservation and then a pickup. The drawing represents the intended transaction, not a record of completed sales. LISTINGRESERVATIONPICKUP

I built a surplus-food marketplace and tried to launch it in Cyprus while living in the US.

I thought the business could work, I just wasn't that interested in food surplus.

Read the project notes
02
still experimenting

Local Real-Time Voice AI

Speech, text chunks, and audioA conceptual drawing of speech passing through text chunks to audio, with the stages of the local voice pipeline below. SPEECHTEXT CHUNKSAUDIO TurnSTTModelTextTTSPlayback

I've been putting together a conversational voice system that runs locally on consumer hardware.

Some versions started speaking quickly but sounded like they restarted at every clause.

Read the project notes
Still wondering

Still stuck on these

Modular assemblyRepeated floor panels above a site. The layers arrive in sequence as the model enters view. PANELSASSEMBLYSITE
  1. 01

    Which housing costs could better technology actually bring down?

  2. 02

    How much does infrastructure cost because people and schedules are hard to coordinate?

  3. 03

    If AI gets cheap, what still makes the physical work expensive?

The rest of the list
Now · October 2026

I'm in my first year at Stanford, exploring EE / CS and spending time on local voice AI and construction.

More on now