Ali Afana

Building AI sales agents for e-commerce From Gaza.
Creator of Provia. I write about AI bugs at
tryhackme:

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Honored to be featured 🙏

The sycophancy bug was one of the wildest I've found — an AI that lies to customers to avoid being rude.

9/10 wrong answers. Fixed it with 3 changes. Full breakdown:
https://t.co/hsnJNyJXEi

Building in public from Gaza — every bug is an article.

[DEV Community @ThePracticalDev]

Congrats to our weekly Top 7 authors! 🎉

This week:
🔹@thorwebdev's tutorial for building a talking robot with Gemini Live + Reachy Mini
🔹The AI sycophancy bug uncovered by @AliMAfana
🔹@enderinco digs into AI's time complexity problems
and more!

https://t.co/f9jfshEOPS

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@AbdulrahmanDev No, I'm working with it RN

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@AbdulrahmanDev حسب مهاراتك اذا منيحة ما بتحتاج السيكورتي بلس

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Two variants of Gemma 4. Three identical rules.
26B MoE → grounded answers.
31B Dense → refused to use data sitting in its own context.
My @Google #GemmaChallenge submission on @ThePracticalDev:
https://t.co/hIjb3qas6z

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@tryhackme Looking for AI security path ! , cant find it there , however I'm logging in to start the path 🤫

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Honored. The 100x cost gap was the moment that made me build this.
Two features that looked identical from the user side. One cost 30x more per call than the other. There was no way to see it from OpenAI's billing page.

[DEV Community @ThePracticalDev]

OpenAI's billing page shows total spend. It doesn't show which feature, which tenant, or which conversation caused it. This dev built a 3-file monitoring system that does, and caught a 100x cost gap on the first run.

{ author: @AliMAfana }

https://t.co/StR4U1Gvwl

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@DorMoshe @ThePracticalDev @aralroca Honored to be in the issue, Dor — especially for the 5 chained bugs piece. That one wasn't the most-read of mine, so the curation call means more. Just subscribed.

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@ThePracticalDev Published my 6th article this month — about fixing 5 chained AI bugs where each fix revealed the next problem underneath.

Also got featured in last week's Top 7 for the AI sycophancy piece 🏆

Building an AI sales platform from Gaza. Every bug becomes an article.

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@ThePracticalDev @thorwebdev @enderinco Honored to be featured 🙏

The sycophancy bug was one of the wildest I've found — an AI that lies to customers to avoid being rude.

9/10 wrong answers. Fixed it with 3 changes. Full breakdown:
https://t.co/hsnJNyJXEi

Building in public from Gaza — every bug is an article.

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Followe my journey here :https://t.co/RGFvC3nOHZ , cant wait to see you all there , thanks for the 1500 followers on https://t.co/RaatQk3lYn in just 5 days and 3 articles, I think the life not that short after all

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

@hackthebox_eu I want to get into it RN 🐉🐉

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

I'm building an AI sales platform from Gaza.

No VC. No co-founder. No startup ecosystem.

Just a laptop, Claude, and a problem I couldn't stop thinking about.

Here's what happened in 8 sessions of building: 🧵

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

I'm building an AI platform from Gaza.

The AI recommended pajamas for date night
Then it invented products that don't exist
Then it forgot what customers asked 30 seconds ago.

I fixed all of it. And I document everything.

→ https://t.co/SUlU0frGRh
Follow for the real journey.

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

My AI sales chatbot kept recommending pajamas for "date night outfits."

Why? "Cozy Night Loungewear Set" the word "night" is semantically close to "date night" in vector space.
The fix: similarity threshold from 0.1 to 0.3.
Sometimes the bug isn't in your code. It's in the math.

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Crushed the day with deep SSRF work
Solved multiple labs
Completed @tryhackme Rooms
Published writeups It’s not just about hacking. It’s about growth, strategy, and consistency.#Cybersecurity #SSRF #BugBounty

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Just finished studying Server-Side Request Forgery (SSRF)

▪️ Understood the core concepts
▪️ Solved multiple labs (blacklist & whitelist based)
▪️ Wrote detailed technical writeups

This was a huge step in my web security journey
#BugBounty #SSRF #WebSecurity #CyberSecurity

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

After two years away from
@tryhackme
, I came back to find myself still ranked in the top 2% globally.Time to rise again — stronger, sharper, and more focused.Let's go. 💻📷#TryHackMe #BugBounty #CyberSecurity #InfoSec #RedTeam

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Just earned the metasploitable badge on @tryhackme and its freaking awesome !

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

Just earned my web fundamentals certificate on @tryhackme! 🎉 Excited to enhance my knowledge in web security and gain practical skills. Thanks to @tryhackme for the incredible learning platform! #WebFundamentals #TryHackMe
#CyberSecurity

[Ali Afana @AliMAfana]

🎉 Just earned the "Intro to Web Hacking" badge on @tryhackme! 🌐💻 Excited to dive into the fascinating world of web security and explore the vulnerabilities ,Thanks to the amazing resources provided by @tryhackme, I'm leveling up my cybersecurity skills! #TryHackMe