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

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