Work

Specific things I’ve built or am building. The list is short on purpose. I’d rather have six real projects than thirty side-quests.

Sulimania — empire stack

The chassis I run my work on. Multi-division operating system that stitches together a FastAPI backend, a Next.js frontend, Cloudflare Workers at the edge, an LLM orchestration layer, a multi-agent execution layer, and a two-machine Tailscale fleet (Lab PC + a Ryzen 9 desktop named Hunter) for compute distribution.

What it actually does day to day: routes my translation jobs, ingests research into structured databases, runs the customer-discovery pipeline for the diaspora-SaaS work, hosts the brain of my newsletter operations, executes scheduled tasks, and acts as the comms spine between Telegram, NATS JetStream, and a personal AI agent layer. The codebase lives in lab/White-Lotus/. Not open source — too much of it is wired into my own keys and personal data — but the patterns are reusable and I’m extracting cleaner versions for the consulting work.

Status: in production, running on me. Not a product yet. The patterns ship as consulting deliverables.

Cognition Worker

A reasoning service deployed to Cloudflare Workers that routes inference between Foundry’s paid lane and a self-hosted Ollama running qwen2.5-coder:14b on the Hunter machine. The point: for any given task, pick the cheapest model that’s good enough, and fall back gracefully when one lane is down. It runs as part of the Sulimania spine and saves me roughly 85% on inference costs versus calling Claude for everything.

The architecture is simple — request comes in, classifier picks the lane, the worker forwards to either Foundry or the local model via a frp tunnel, response comes back. The interesting part is the falling-back-gracefully part, which most “model routers” online handle badly.

Status: live as part of internal infra. Documentation pending. The pattern is portable to other deployments.

Freight Worker — freight.bl-operations.com

A Cloudflare Worker that handles Stripe webhook intake for a small freight-coordination experiment. Receives webhook events, validates signatures, routes by event type, dispatches to downstream queues. Boring on purpose. Cloudflare Workers are great at this — edge runtime, near-zero cold start, and the platform handles retries.

This is the kind of glue infrastructure that small operators always end up needing. If you have a Stripe / Shopify / Lemon Squeezy / webhook ecosystem and you want a layer between “vendor sends event” and “your real system reacts to it,” I can build you the same pattern in roughly a day.

Status: live at freight.bl-operations.com. Source private.

Pashto / Dari / English translation

Active service line. I translate USCIS forms, asylum affidavits, medical intake forms, legal depositions, academic transcripts, and other immigration-adjacent documents between Pashto (پښتو), Dari (دری — the Afghan variety, distinct from Iranian Persian / Farsi), and English. I’m a native Pashto speaker, fluent in Dari, and I went through the US immigration system myself, so I know what an attorney needs and what a USCIS officer reads.

A note on Dari vs Persian/Farsi: these are mutually intelligible but politically and culturally distinct. If your client is Afghan, the document is Dari, not Persian. The distinction matters for asylum cases (where origin is the whole evidentiary point), for cultural-context translation (idioms diverge), and for honest naming. I will not market my Afghan-language work as “Persian” because that erases the country it came from. If you specifically need Iranian Persian / Farsi work, I’ll refer you to a colleague.

I’m listed on Upwork and ProZ, but the better path is to email me directly — the pricing is fairer and the turnaround is faster when there’s no platform fee in the middle. Sworn certifications available. I can also do live interpretation for medical, legal, or interview settings on the East Coast.

Status: open for work. translate@zafarkhil.com.

Senior thesis — A Compass to an Absurd Existence

A philosophy thesis braiding Nietzsche, Camus, and Arendt into a usable framework for living with dignity in a post-meaning age. Submitted April 29th, 2026. Two further chapters going out in late July 2026.

The core argument: the absurd (Camus) is the condition, the death of inherited meaning (Nietzsche) is the rupture, and the public-political space (Arendt) is the site where dignity gets reconstituted. Or, less compactly: how do you act well when nothing’s given to you, and you can’t fake it with ideology, and you also can’t retreat into pure interiority? It’s a refugee thesis written by a refugee, although the questions outscale the biography.

Excerpts will be published on the writing page as they’re ready. Full PDF on request after the July chapters.

Status: chapters one through five submitted. Six and seven in draft.

Claude Skills marketplace listings

I’m shipping three skills to the Anthropic Skills marketplace at an $87 catalog floor. They’re distillations of templates I actually use — not “how to write a prompt” content, but actual workflows packaged so other people can pick them up.

Skill one: a structured-research skill that does the firecrawl-into-synthesized-output loop with built-in source attribution. Skill two: a customer-discovery interview pattern with Socratic question scaffolding. Skill three: a thesis/long-form-writing skill that treats outline, draft, and revision as separate Claude calls with different prompts. Listings going live as the marketplace approval clears.

Status: three skills built, first listing in approval. Public links once live.

Diaspora-SaaS customer discovery

Active interview pipeline with 30 Afghan-origin small-business prospects in the US. Goal: figure out where AI tooling actually creates value for immigrant operators (translation, customer service, content, ops, accounting) and where it’s just hype that doesn’t survive contact with the actual workflow. Findings will become a public report and probably a small SaaS product if the pattern is real.

This is the part of my work I’m most uncertain about. I know AI is useful. I don’t know whether the specific shape it should take for a kebab shop in Sacramento or a halal grocer in Northern Virginia is the same shape it takes for a YC-funded SaaS in San Francisco. The interviews are how I find out.

Status: in field. First synthesis report due late summer.

Mosaic murals

Mosaic mural work is the part of the practice that lives offline. I cut tile, design pattern fields, and build commissioned wall pieces — mostly stoneware on cement board for indoor installs, with a small line of hospitality-grade work that’s tougher and meant for traffic. The throughline with the rest of what I do is arrangement: translation is arrangement of meaning, code is arrangement of behavior, and a mosaic is arrangement at the most literal level — one tile next to another until a wall becomes a thing. The internal storefront with the catalog, configurator, and quote form is the operational lane; the personal-site page is the narrative. Read more.

Status: taking a small number of commissions per year. Photo archive being curated; site assets refreshing in May 2026.

Afghan land cartography (hobby)

A long-running personal project to digitize my inherited family land in Ghazni, Paktia, Paktika, and Nangarhar provinces. The deeds are qabaala-style (قباله) — described by markers (neighboring trees, streambeds, named stones), not GPS. I’m slowly building a QGIS-based atlas using satellite imagery and the deeds, georeferencing what I can.

I include this here not because anyone’s hiring me to do it, but because it’s the most honest piece of work I do. There’s no client, no deadline, no monetization. It’s an act of holding-on against forgetting. If you’re working on cultural-heritage-mapping or refugee-archive projects, I’d love to talk.

Status: ongoing. No public release planned.

If you want any of this built for you, the consulting page is contact. If you want to see code, GitHub — though most of my real work is in private repos because it’s wired into my personal infrastructure.