Brice Ayres, founder of Axio Intelligence, on fractional engineering and what changes when one senior engineer can run a team of AI agents. Brice went from the Army and a 3.7 million follower Facebook cause to finding Elixir at Topgolf, leading engineering orgs, and going out on his own.
We get into managing agents like an engineering org, whether you still need to read every line, and why Ash keeps LLMs on the rails. I share how a team of Grok Bots handles marketing, support, and QA for Killswitch, and we close with Brice's playbook for cutting cloud costs.
00:00 - Introduction
02:51 - Web dev class, the Army, and a viral nonprofit
08:38 - Finding Elixir at Topgolf
13:00 - What is fractional engineering?
16:10 - Vibe coding and why engineers still matter
24:03 - Think like an engineering manager
26:32 - Reviewing AI code, Ash, and established patterns
29:55 - Offmic, a live AI podcast producer
35:18 - Running agents like an engineering org
40:51 - Read-only agents in prod and self-healing infra
42:05 - A Polymarket bot with agent consensus
47:06 - Marketing Killswitch with Grok Bots
52:06 - Lighthouse scores and agentic browsing
56:13 - Getting found by LLMs
59:27 - Order with Surf: agentic food ordering
1:02:48 - Agent QA and local testing with K3s and Floci
1:05:40 - Data labeling, synthetic data, and edge AI
1:08:55 - Nerves, Peridio, and Avocado OS
1:11:47 - Bot traffic, analytics, and self-hosting
1:16:00 - Hardware stories and real-world edge cases
1:26:24 - When engineers ship faster than you can plan
1:29:10 - Monoliths, Postgres scaling, and ETS
1:36:40 - Where to find Brice
1:37:44 - Cutting cloud costs: logging and AZ traffic
Resources Mentioned:
- Axio Intelligence: https://axiointelligence.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
- Grok Bot: https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot?utm_source=elixir-mentor
- Killswitch: https://killswitch.app/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
Connect with Brice:
- X/Twitter: https://x.com/briceayres?utm_source=elixir-mentor
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briceayres/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps: https://beamops.co.uk/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
- Paraxial.io: https://paraxial.io/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
- Jido: https://agentjido.xyz/discord?utm_source=elixir-mentor
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor
#ElixirLang #MyElixirStatus #ElixirMentor
