Brice Ayres on Fractional Engineering

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 - Introduction02:51 - Web dev class, the Army, and a viral nonprofit08:38 - Finding Elixir at Topgolf13:00 - What is fractional engineering?16:10 - Vibe coding and why engineers still matter24:03 - Think like an engineering manager26:32 - Reviewing AI code, Ash, and established patterns29:55 - Offmic, a live AI podcast producer35:18 - Running agents like an engineering org40:51 - Read-only agents in prod and self-healing infra42:05 - A Polymarket bot with agent consensus47:06 - Marketing Killswitch with Grok Bots52:06 - Lighthouse scores and agentic browsing56:13 - Getting found by LLMs59:27 - Order with Surf: agentic food ordering1:02:48 - Agent QA and local testing with K3s and Floci1:05:40 - Data labeling, synthetic data, and edge AI1:08:55 - Nerves, Peridio, and Avocado OS1:11:47 - Bot traffic, analytics, and self-hosting1:16:00 - Hardware stories and real-world edge cases1:26:24 - When engineers ship faster than you can plan1:29:10 - Monoliths, Postgres scaling, and ETS1:36:40 - Where to find Brice1:37:44 - Cutting cloud costs: logging and AZ trafficResources 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-mentorConnect with Brice:- X/Twitter: https://x.com/briceayres?utm_source=elixir-mentor- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/briceayres/?utm_source=elixir-mentorSponsors:- 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-mentorSUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR- Elixir Mentor: https://elixirmentor.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor#ElixirLang #MyElixirStatus #ElixirMentor