Colombo, Sri Lanka--:-- GMT+5:30
Available for Q4 2026 projects

Lakindu ලකිඳු පැහැසරPahesara

Lakindu Pahesara, in a navy suit with his arms folded

I build websites, apps and AI that earn their keep.

A data scientist who ships to production.

I write Node, Python and Next.js, and I read the logs.

Founder of CEYLAI Labs. I lead your project from the first call to launch: strategy, the design standard and a review of every delivery. Clients across the EU, UK and US.

BSc (Hons) Data Science, University of Plymouth, Second Class Upper. Four years of paid client delivery before graduating, and two AI systems built end to end.

LLM agents with tool-enforced grounding, medical imaging models with their error bars, Streamlit document engines and fast front ends.

Start a projectSee the work

Download CVRead my story

Browse the workGitHub

Reading as

ClientRecruiterEngineer

Taking paid builds since: 2022
Builds shipped under CEYLAI Labs: 11
Languages one WhatsApp agent answers in: 4
Client markets: EU, UK and US: 3

Mean validation AUC, six haemorrhage classes on CT: 0.9878
BSc (Hons) Data Science, University of Plymouth: 2:1
Parameter model fine-tuned with QLoRA on one GPU: 7B
Paid client delivery before graduating: 4 yrs

Lighter homepage after a rebuild, 1.77 MB to about 125 kB: 14×
Cached MRI validation pass, down from full preprocessing every run: 8 s
The Python pin that ended a Streamlit Cloud segfault: 3.12
Tool call the agent must make before it quotes a product: 1

PausePlay

AI agents
Data science
Next.js
Medical imaging
LLM fine-tuning
FastAPI
Brand systems
Document engines
Computer vision
Streamlit
Performance
Automation
AI agents
Data science
Next.js
Medical imaging
LLM fine-tuning
FastAPI
Brand systems
Document engines
Computer vision
Streamlit
Performance
Automation

01Contents

I started taking paid builds in 2022, while studying data science. Today I run CEYLAI Labs, a software and AI studio in Sri Lanka, and I still write the hard parts myself.

Read the story About four minutes, in eight chapters

02Selected work

Four stories,each told three ways.

Every project can be read for business, for hiring or for engineering. The switch at the top has already chosen a reading for you, and every card lets you change it.

Multilingual WhatsApp Commerce Agent

Live and scaling

Pehesara Book Shop, productised under CEYLAI Labs, 2026

Pehesara Book ShopAI assistant · replies in your language

Hi! Do you have the Grade 6 maths workbook?

Four registers, one agent

The model can only quote what catalogue.search returns. If nothing comes back, it says so instead of guessing.

Four customers in four languages, one agent. An illustrative conversation; the catalogue items are examples, not the shop's stock list.

A WhatsApp agent that answers shop customers in English, Sinhala, Tamil and Singlish, and can only quote what the product catalogue says.

Problem: Sri Lankan shops lose sales in WhatsApp chats they cannot answer fast enough, and customers often write in Sinhala, Tamil or Singlish rather than English.
Constraint: A wrong price or a stock promise the shop cannot keep costs more than a slow reply. Whatever answers has to be right as well as fast, and cheap enough per conversation for a small shop.
Decision: An agent that replies in the customer's own language, sends one message per turn and may only quote products that the shop's catalogue returns.
Outcome: Live for Pehesara Book Shop, and packaged by CEYLAI as a service for other businesses, planned to roll out ahead of Meta's October 2026 pricing change.

Node.js
Meta WhatsApp Cloud API
Claude Haiku 4.5
Tool use

Read the case study

CEYLAI Labs: studio and identity

Operating

My own studio, Ceylon Artificial Intelligence & Digital Innovation Laboratories

Ceylon Artificial Intelligence & Digital Innovation Laboratories

Black and white only: a colour is a claim

The CEYLAI wordmark, drawn from the studio's own brand files. The letters trace themselves, then the drop falls into place as the dot of the i.

A Sri Lankan software, web and AI studio built around one mark, a drop that is also the island, and one quality standard applied to every build.

Problem: Clients in the EU, UK and US buying from Sri Lanka need a reason to trust a studio they will never visit.
Constraint: No budget for paid advertising, a team that builds, and one person who has to be both the face of the studio and its quality bar.
Decision: Position the studio as a digital growth partner, with fixed-price projects followed by retainers, a zero-cost prospecting workflow and a 90-day plan, and apply The House Standard to every build.
Outcome: Operating, with eleven builds in the studio register, from hotel and tutoring ventures to client websites and a call centre prototype.

Brand system
Positioning
The House Standard
Astro

Read the case study

Invoice and Quotation Engine for Pehesara Engineers

In daily use

Pehesara Engineers, aluminium and glass, 2026

Windows6

PEHESARA ENGINEERS

Aluminium & Glass Fixing Specialists

QUOTATION

No. PE-0142

To: Client name, Colombo
Dear Sir,

Product or service	Qty	Rate	Amount
Aluminium sliding window, 1800 × 1200 mm, fitted	6	38,500	231,000.00
10 mm tempered glass partition	240 sq ft	1,150	276,000.00
Aluminium door frame with fittings	2	64,000	128,000.00
Installation and site labour	1	85,000	85,000.00

Subtotal: Rs. 720,000.00
Discount (5%): minus Rs. 36,000.00
Total: Rs. 684,000.00
Advance required (50%): Rs. 342,000.00
Balance: Rs. 342,000.00

Thank you.

Pehesara Engineers · stand-in signature

TERMS & CONDITIONS Any additional work or changes will be charged separately. Delivery or installation timelines may vary depending on site conditions and material availability.

The letterhead layout assembling line by line. Illustrative figures, not a real invoice, and the signature is a stand-in.

A phone-first app that produces invoices and quotations indistinguishable from the company letterhead, and every PDF it makes can be opened again for editing.

Problem: A family aluminium and glass firm was writing its invoices and quotations in Word, including the documents for Hayleys PLC's Farmers Building refurbishment.
Constraint: Documents going to a listed company must match the letterhead exactly and get every figure right, and they are often needed from a phone on site.
Decision: A small web app. Fill in the job on a phone, tap Generate, and download a PDF that matches the letterhead, with the signature and terms included.
Outcome: In daily use for the firm's invoices and quotations, including the Farmers Building documents. Old PDFs can be opened again and edited, so nothing is retyped.

Python 3.12
Streamlit
ReportLab
Carlito

Read the case study

RATNADEEPA Gem Dealer Showcase

Shipped

Ratnadeepa, Ratnapura, through CEYLAI Labs, 2026

6,504 K154 miredD65 daylight

Simulation, interpolated in mireds. The real site shows two unretouched photographs per stone.

A simulation, not a photograph. The light is interpolated in mireds between D65 and 2800 K tungsten and applied to a drawn stone.

A dark vault of a website where every stone is shown under two lights, D65 daylight and 2800 K tungsten, because that is how dealers actually judge colour.

Problem: A buyer abroad cannot hold a stone up to the window. One photo under one light hides the question every dealer asks, which is how the stone looks by evening light.
Constraint: A luxury trade that runs on trust, viewed mostly on phones, where retouched photography is common and buyers know it.
Decision: A vault aesthetic with near-black surfaces, brass and a restrained serif, and a light table that moves each stone between D65 daylight and 2800 K tungsten photographs.
Outcome: Shipped. Buyers can answer the colour question themselves before they book the flight.

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
SVG

Read the case study

AI-Powered Stroke Emergency Triage System

Research prototype

Final-year research, BSc (Hons) Data Science, University of Plymouth, 2026

The Stroke AI Triage dashboard after a run: inputs on the left, and on the right the result badges HIGH, URGENT, Stroke YES and mixed or uncertain, the reasons list, haemorrhage probability bars and the ischaemia output of 100.05 ml. — Screens from the working system, and its real output on a test case. Research prototype, not a medical device.

Screens from the working system, and its real output on a test case. Research prototype, not a medical device.

Two medical imaging models, one on CT and one on MRI, combined into a single triage decision that shows its evidence and exports a clinical-style PDF report.

Problem: Stroke treatment depends on knowing quickly whether a patient is bleeding or has a blocked vessel, and emergency imaging often waits for a radiologist.
Constraint: CT and MRI answer different clinical questions, and a clinician will not act on a score they cannot inspect. The system had to explain itself and be clear about what it is not.
Decision: Two specialist models and a transparent rule layer that turns their outputs into stroke type, severity and review priority, shown with the evidence and exported as a PDF report.
Outcome: A working prototype that runs on a single workstation. The next step would be clinical validation with radiologists, not a launch.

PyTorch
MONAI
EfficientNet-B0
3D U-Net
Grad-CAM
FastAPI
React
Tailwind CSS
ReportLab

Read the case study Code

Infinity Consulting Rebuild

Delivered

Infinity Consulting, Colombo, 2026

The rebuilt Infinity Consulting homepage: a headline about consulting that ends with your team able to run it, and a photograph of Colombo's business district. — Drag to compare. The before view is redrawn from the measured audit of the old homepage; the after view is a real capture of the rebuild.

A consulting firm's website rebuilt from a 1.77 MB homepage with a blocked hero image to about 125 kB, with a pre-launch checklist that caught what the old site never had.

Problem: The homepage hero was a stock photo of Kuala Lumpur served over http on an https page, so browsers blocked it and the hero showed as a flat grey block.
Constraint: Keep the firm's content, sort out five conflicting phone numbers, and launch with a working contact form but no backend to run.
Decision: A full rebuild with a pre-launch checklist covering the contact form, a data consistency audit and SEO set up from nothing, since the old homepage had no h1 and no meta description.
Outcome: The homepage went from 1.77 MB across 38 requests to about 125 kB across 8, with a Colombo hero image that is actually Colombo.

Astro
Static HTML
Self-hosted fonts
AVIF

Read the case study

Bilingual Mental Wellness Chatbot

Working prototype

Final-year project, BSc (Hons) Data Science, University of Plymouth, 2026

Message inI feel lonely at night and I keep overthinking.

Detect language
Translate to English
Recognise emotion
Check riskbefore the model
Respond
Translate back

Real messages and responses from the running system, including its API output. The crisis route returns a fixed message with Sri Lanka's 1926 helpline.

Supportive conversation in Sinhala and English from a locally hosted, QLoRA-tuned Qwen2.5-7B, with a deterministic safety route that bypasses the model for high-risk messages.

Problem: Most wellness chatbots only speak English, which asks people to describe how they feel in their second language.
Constraint: In this domain the failure that matters is missing a person at risk, and conversations are sensitive enough that storing them should never be the default.
Decision: A bilingual pipeline that reads emotion and checks for risk before the language model answers, and sends high-risk messages to a fixed crisis response with a local helpline.
Outcome: A working Sinhala and English prototype, designed to avoid diagnosis and medication advice, that stores no message text by default.

Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
QLoRA
PEFT
TRL
Ollama
GGUF Q4_K_M
RoBERTa GoEmotions
FastAPI
React
TypeScript
SQLite

Read the case study Code

Seven case studies, eleven studio builds and the side projects

See all the work

03The studio

Eleven builds, shipped under CEYLAI Labs

Each label is the one in CEYLAI's own register: venture means a CEYLAI company; client means built for a named business; concept means a concept with an invented brand, never presented as a client; prototype means working software for a client's review, with invented data.

Inside the studio

Northlight

Hotel websites and photography, Colombo

Venture

Visit the site

Reliance Business Partners

Accountants and advisers, Nugegoda

Client

Visit the site

Ceylon Getaways

Private tours, Sri Lanka

Client

Visit the site

KYK Atelier

Interior design and build, Colombo

Client

Private build, screenshot only

Pandama.lk

Private tutoring marketplace, Colombo

Venture

Private build, screenshot only

Serendib Exports

Fresh produce export, Sri Lanka

Client

Visit the site

Ratnadeepa

Ceylon gemstones, Ratnapura

Client

Private build, screenshot only

HR Corporate Solutions

Corporate services, Colombo

Client

Private build, screenshot only

Kaduru House

Boutique hotel, Mirissa

Concept

Visit the site

Ceylon Cars

Car hire, Colombo

Concept

Visit the site

CallDesk

Call centre software, Sri Lanka

Prototype

Private build, screenshot only

04Capabilities

What I work on,and how deep each one goes.

Depth is marked honestly. Deep means shipped to paying users more than once, Working means shipped or submitted at least once, and Learning means studied and prototyped but not yet shipped.

01 AI and data

Models and agents that make a decision someone can check.

LLM agents with tool-enforced groundingWhatsApp commerce agentDeep
Dashboards and data appsStreamlit tools in daily useDeep
Deep learning in PyTorchEfficientNet-B0, 3D U-NetWorking
Medical imaging: classification and segmentationRSNA and ISLES 2022Working
LLM fine-tuning with QLoRA, local inferenceQwen2.5-7B on OllamaWorking
Explainability: Grad-CAM, lesion masksStroke triageWorking
RAG and MLOpsLearning

02 Web and product

Front ends that load fast and back ends that stay up.

Next.js and ReactThis siteDeep
Node.js services and APIsWhatsApp Cloud API agentDeep
Streamlit and ReportLab document enginesInvoice engineDeep
Performance and Core Web Vitals1.77 MB to 125 kBDeep
FastAPI servicesTwo AI systemsWorking
Technical SEO and structured dataWorking
Native mobile appsLearning

03 Brand and growth

Identity and standards that let a small team work like a studio.

Identity systemsThe CEYLAI markDeep
Design standards and QAThe House StandardDeep
Go-to-market for small businessesCEYLAI's 90-day planWorking
Content and short-form scriptsWorking
Social growth for new sectorsLearning

05Next chapter

Let's build the thingyour competitorswill copy.

Start a project Book a call

It is --:-- in Colombo. I reply within 24 hours.

Lakindu ලකිඳු පැහැසරPahesara

The story so far, in eight chapters

Eleven builds, shipped under CEYLAI Labs

01 AI and data

02 Web and product

03 Brand and growth

Let's build the thingyour competitorswill copy.