An AI-powered Vedic astrology consultation

In India, consulting an astrologer for major life decisions is as routine as consulting a doctor. Marriages, business launches, the naming of a child — the auspicious date and time, called muhuratam, comes from the family astrologer. The same way an American family might have a pediatrician on speed dial, my family has both. My wife and I were married on a date our astrologer chose. The practice is deeply woven into the cultural fabric, and whether you treat it as ancient science, lived tradition, or something else entirely, the consultation is a real product category — one that millions of people use every year and that has barely changed in form for centuries.

Staravana is what that consultation looks like as a product. It takes the three inputs an astrologer takes — date, place, and time of birth — and answers the questions a person typically arrives with. The output isn't only an interpretation; it includes the practical behavioral suggestions a good astrologer might offer but rarely puts in writing. The reasoning is shown alongside the answer. The format is conversation, not paragraph-block diagnosis.

I built it end to end, which sounds more impressive than the experience actually was. The product concept, the user flow, the prompt design, the front-end, the back-end, the domain setup, the legal and compliance scaffolding — all of it ran through me, and most of it ran through me for the first time. The syntax was generated under direction, the same disciplined posture as the AI-accelerated work in my professional projects. What Staravana taught me was the part of shipping a product that no industrial engineer encounters in a normal week: domain registration, hosting, page-load decisions, terms of service, the weird ten-thousand small choices that separate a working prototype from a thing other people can actually use.

It was also the project that made me confident I could build my own portfolio. The skills I practiced on Staravana — running multiple Claude sessions for strategy and design in parallel, using Claude Code for implementation, treating GitHub like a real engineer treats GitHub — those are the same skills shashankraman.com is built on. My wife, who's a software engineer by trade, watched me submit pull requests and merge branches and pretended to be jealous. Staravana was the rehearsal. The portfolio was the performance. Both are still running.