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AYLA CROFT

About Me

I’m Ayla Croft, a completely self-taught builder who learned the only way that ever really stuck for me: get hands on, break things, build them back better, repeat until the pattern clicks.

That path pulled me into AI security, purple teaming, systems thinking, infrastructure, and product design with an operator bias. I can work across plenty of stacks, but Elixir, the BEAM, and Phoenix are home base because they let me build serious systems without dragging in a circus of moving parts.

My AI security work has been cited in system cards across top labs, and I co-authored Security Challenges in AI Agent Deployment: Insights from a Large Scale Public Competition, built from the largest public AI red teaming competition of its kind and tied directly to the ART benchmark.

I’m addicted to learning. That has turned into a career built on research, hands-on engineering, playful interfaces, honest telemetry, and the belief that secure systems can still have personality.

Recent Milestones

  • Self-Taught to Shipped Built a real career by learning in public, building relentlessly, and treating every project like a lab where ideas have to survive contact with reality.
  • AI Security Research Helped turn 1.8 million prompt-injection attacks across 22 frontier agents into a public paper and benchmark, with work that has since been cited in system cards from major labs.
  • Def Con Path Won a trip to DEF CON my first year, then came back the next year representing Gray Swan AI and leading the in-person plus online AI red teaming challenge we brought to the conference.
  • Purple Team Tooling Built HackTUI and HackTUI Hermes Jido as terminal-native systems for investigations, telemetry, MCP interoperability, and bounded agent-assisted workflows.
  • Nonprofit + Platform Work Started Script Kitty Foundation to help underserved people get into tech while also helping rescues raise money through software, then started building Script Kitty OS to support that mission.
  • What Comes Next Continuing to build Script Kitty OS, HackTUI, a SIEM, and an open source C2 framework, while also creating an AI red teaming game to help more people break into the field.

Selected Work

Purple Team Tooling

HackTUI Hermes Jido

Terminal-native purple-team platform built for operators who want inspectable workflows, not fake autonomy theater.

This is the kind of system I love most: practical, weird in the right ways, and honest about what the machine is actually doing.

Mission-Driven Platform

Script Kitty OS

A platform supporting the Script Kitty Foundation mission and the broader idea that technology can be playful, useful, and materially helpful at the same time.

It is one of the clearest examples of how I think: strategy, story, security, systems, and creativity all in the same build.

Nonprofit + Future Buildout

Script Kitty Foundation

A nonprofit focused on creating more access into tech for underserved communities while also helping animal rescues raise money through technology we build.

That mission is the long game. More tools, more grants, more pathways in, and more room for curious people to get their shot.