How my Dubai barber changed the way I build with AI

It was 3am. I had just finished what I'll generously call version 32,488,129,341,982,192,837 of what we now call AO Pulse, the lead generation platform that was supposed to be straightforward. I had a flight at 6am. I had a sleep debt as high as mount Everest, an average token consumption of 821.8M per day. I was the kind of exhausted where your body has moved past tired into a strange, crystalline calm.

I closed my laptop, walked downstairs to the barber next to my apartment and got a haircut (yes it’s Dubai, there’s always a barber opened somewhere). Maybe I needed to feel like something was under control. Maybe I just needed someone else to execute a plan properly for fifteen minutes.

Virtual Insanity

Few months prior, somebody had asked me to build a scraper, a lead generation tool. At the time I thought to myself: how hard can it be? I'd seen what AI could do, I'd been using n8n for automations, and my exact plan was: plug in a scraper, connect a few things, and voilà!

I genuinely believed this would take a weekend. I first sat down with the AI, describe what I wanted, and it generated a plan. The plan looked smart. It used words I didn't fully understand yet, and I thought, "This thing clearly knows more than me, so let's go."

Fast forward three weeks. I was losing sleep, I had two authentication systems fighting each other for dominance, a middleware so complex it blocked every single request, and three WebSockets competing like jealous siblings.

So, I did what any sane person would do: I restarted. And restarted. And restarted again. Each time thinking this time I had it figured out. Each time trusting the AI's architecture because it sounded more competent than me.

The skill I already knew

I started at 23, folding napkins. By 25 I was running a concierge company in Dubai. Somewhere in between, I had organized a wedding for 1,030 guests across ten countries — the groom was a chairman, three hundred people reported to me, and failure was simply not available as an option. Then came UniK Concierge: seven years, 21 employees, 300 partnerships, and a discipline forged in the specific pressure of making other people's lives run perfectly. Then a coworking space in Switzerland, coaching founders on how to structure an idea before executing it. I didn't know it at the time, but I was learning the same thing on a loop: a plan is not a formality. It is the difference between execution and chaos wearing a suit.

And then I sat down with an AI agent and did exactly what every first-time manager does: I delegated without a plan and trusted the new hire because it sounded confident.

AI coding assistants are like managing a five-year-old with infinite knowledge. They know everything and understand nothing. They'll give you a technically correct answer to a question you didn't ask, and they'll do it with absolute certainty. Leave them unsupervised, and they'll build you something architecturally insane while smiling the whole time.

If you do not plan, if you do not write a PRD, research every technology, understand every module, and know what you're building before you write a single prompt, the AI will plan for you. And its plan will be wrong. Not always dramatically wrong. Sometimes subtly wrong. Which is worse

Ideas to reality

Once I started planning first, everything changed.

I built Orial, a chatbot that plugs into any system and channel, just connect your API keys, in one week. One week. After AO Pulse took four months. I built my own Virtual Data Room in two days, because the open-source options were terrible and I didn't feel like paying for one. I built our company website, aodxb.ai, in three days.

And then there's AlignEat. This one is Aurélie's brainchild. She conceived it, she planned the whole thing, and it's a beast: three databases, an admin panel, a mobile app, ten moving parts. We built it. And it works. And it's beautiful.

Four products. In under a year. From someone who had never written a line of code before June.

I didn't learn to code. I want to be clear about that. I can read it now, I can debug it, I can architect a system, but I didn't sit down and learn Python or JavaScript in any traditional sense.

If a hospitality guy from Geneva who spent his formative years learning wine pairings and folding napkins at EHL can do this, then of course you can do it too.

What I learned was how to manage a new kind of team member. One that works at superhuman speed, never sleeps, knows every framework ever written, and has the strategic judgment of a golden retriever. Brilliant, eager, and not to be left unsupervised, at any cost.

The skill that made this work wasn't technical. It was the same discipline that ran weddings and built concierge companies. Plan before you move. Never assume the nod means understanding.

The barber understood this before I did. He didn't pick up the blade until he knew exactly what he was building.

Plan first. Trust yourself more than you trust the AI. And find a barber that's open at 3am. You might need one.

Karim Chbib is the co-founder of Ascent Oriental, building AI-powered tools for SMEs and hospitality in the MENA region.