I Spent Two Years Building the Median — Hariprasad Sudharshan
After two years of intense solo building, Hariprasad Sudharshan discovers that other people have independently produced calculators much like his own.
Nobody needs to have copied anyone: the same models, tools and familiar problem can lead builders toward the same solution. He calls that shared starting point the median. Faster development makes it easier to ship useful software, including internal tools and learning projects, but a functioning demo does not establish a durable product advantage. His talk is a personal reflection on that distinction, rather than a controlled study of product success or a disclosed business outcome. Sudharshan separates the model's capability from its harness and the product a customer ultimately receives. He describes a build first reflex that replaces searching for existing solutions with immediately opening a coding agent. His alternative is a novelty budget: name the one distinctive thing before starting, include it in the roadmap and review it as deliberately as other project spending. For leaders evaluating demos, he proposes three questions. Who has already solved this? What does this team have that a competitor does not?
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