Brice Ayres on Fractional Engineering

<p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p></p><p>00:00 - Introduction</p><p>02:51 - Web dev class, the Army, and a viral nonprofit</p><p>08:38 - Finding Elixir at Topgolf</p><p>13:00 - What is fractional engineering?</p><p>16:10 - Vibe coding and why engineers still matter</p><p>24:03 - Think like an engineering manager</p><p>26:32 - Reviewing AI code, Ash, and established patterns</p><p>29:55 - Offmic, a live AI podcast producer</p><p>35:18 - Running agents like an engineering org</p><p>40:51 - Read-only agents in prod and self-healing infra</p><p>42:05 - A Polymarket bot with agent consensus</p><p>47:06 - Marketing Killswitch with Grok Bots</p><p>52:06 - Lighthouse scores and agentic browsing</p><p>56:13 - Getting found by LLMs</p><p>59:27 - Order with Surf: agentic food ordering</p><p>1:02:48 - Agent QA and local testing with K3s and Floci</p><p>1:05:40 - Data labeling, synthetic data, and edge AI</p><p>1:08:55 - Nerves, Peridio, and Avocado OS</p><p>1:11:47 - Bot traffic, analytics, and self-hosting</p><p>1:16:00 - Hardware stories and real-world edge cases</p><p>1:26:24 - When engineers ship faster than you can plan</p><p>1:29:10 - Monoliths, Postgres scaling, and ETS</p><p>1:36:40 - Where to find Brice</p><p>1:37:44 - Cutting cloud costs: logging and AZ traffic</p><p></p><p>Resources Mentioned:</p><p>- Axio Intelligence: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://axiointelligence.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor" target="_blank">https://axiointelligence.com/?utm_source=elixir-mentor</a></p><p>- Grok Bot: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot?utm_source=elixir-mentor" target="_blank">https://x.ai/news/introducing-grok-bot?utm_source=elixir-mentor</a></p><p>- Killswitch: <a rel="noopener noreferrer nofollow" href="https://killswitch.app/?utm_source=elixir-mentor" target="_blank">https://killswitch.app/?utm_source=elixir-mentor</a></p><p>Connect with Brice:</p><p>- X/Twitter: