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Building from Gaza, Palestine

Ali M. Afana

Developer · Cybersecurity Student · Builder

I live in Gaza. I build AI-powered products and document everything — the wins, the failures, the 2 AM debugging sessions. Because building from here isn't a limitation. It's a perspective.

My current project is Provia — a platform that gives any store owner an AI sales assistant. It knows their products, speaks in their brand's voice, handles returns and shipping questions, and talks to customers in their own language. I built the entire platform in 8 sessions and shared every story. One article about a pajama bug got me 1,000 followers.

"Every API call counts when you don't know when the power goes out. Every token matters when your budget is your own pocket. That constraint makes you build better software."

I'm not a CS grad. I'm a cybersecurity student who watches tutorials, breaks things, and Googles errors at 2 AM. But building real products teaches you more about security than any textbook. Every API I wrote unprotected, every prompt injection I caught, every RLS policy I messed up — those are the lessons that stick.

8
Build Sessions
1K+
Followers
550
Tokens/Message
10/10
Tests Passing
Writing

Stories from building Provia

Real bugs from a real product. Click to read the full story.

AI Search1000+ followers

My AI Kept Recommending Pajamas for Date Night

How vector similarity search doesn't understand shopping intent

A customer typed "show me something for a date night" and my AI returned pajamas. The fix: a three-tier fallback chain that changed how I think about search.

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Debugging

I Fixed 5 Chained AI Bugs — Each Fix Revealed the Next

When one bug hides four more underneath

What looked like one broken search turned out to be five bugs stacked on top of each other. Each fix peeled back a layer.

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Optimization55% saved

How I Cut AI Costs by 55%

From $300 to $140 per million messages

I split one big GPT-4o-mini call into two specialized calls. Tokens per message dropped from 1,820 to 830.

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Architecture

Your AI Is Lying to Your Customers

And prompt engineering won't fix it

My AI invented products that didn't exist. The fix was architectural: function calling with real database lookups.

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Testing78/80 passing

80 Messages, 15 Bugs, Zero Crashes

How I tested my AI chatbot to death

I ran 80+ test messages across 6 stores. Found prompt injection, ALL CAPS crashes, and hallucinated policies.

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AI Safety

Your AI Will Agree With Anything

The stock lie that broke trust

The AI said a jacket was sold out. It had 12 in stock. The AI was trained to be agreeable, not accurate.

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DevOps

I Built My Own AI Cost Monitoring Dashboard

153 lines that revealed 80% waste

OpenAI's dashboard shows total spend. I needed per-conversation, per-store breakdowns. 3 files changed everything.

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Journey

How I Built an AI Sales Bot in One Day

As a beginner developer from Gaza

I'm not a CS grad. I'm a cybersecurity student who Googles error messages at 2 AM. But in one day, I built an AI that sells.

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Stack

What I build with

Next.js 16React 19TypeScriptTailwind CSS 4SupabasePostgreSQLOpenAI GPT-4opgvectorRow Level SecurityZodNode.js

Let's build something

I'm open to collaborations, freelance work, and interesting conversations. Reach out — I reply to everything.

ali.afanatv@gmail.com