Elixir Mentor

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

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I step a little outside the BEAM to talk with Francesco Ciulla, Head of DevRel at Zerops. Francesco came up as a Rust developer and content creator with a 300,000-subscriber YouTube channel, and we get into the problem every builder runs into: getting developers to actually adopt what you ship.
Francesco shares how he went from a corporate developer role at the European Space Agency to going independent, building an audience, and publishing his own Rust book. We talk about why distribution matters as much as the work itself, how public speaking changed him, and what being a developer looks like in 2026 with AI in the mix.
From there we get into developer relations directly. Francesco explains what the job actually is, why you can't advocate for a product you don't believe in, and how he builds credibility for something he didn't write. He breaks down what Zerops does as a platform, how it compares to running things on GCP, and where developers fall off between signing up and getting real value.
We also cover building a brand by declaring it and not stopping, why negative comments are a sign your audience is growing, language tribalism in tech, the risks of shipping vibe-coded projects without thinking about security, and what it takes to run Elixir on Zerops. A useful conversation for anyone trying to get a tool, a project, or themselves in front of developers.
Resources Mentioned:
- Zerops:https://zerops.io
Connect with Francesco:
- X/Twitter:https://x.com/FrancescoCiull4
- Website:https://francescociulla.com
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps:https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io:https://paraxial.io
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor:https://elixirmentor.com

Jason Allum returns to the Elixir Mentor Podcast to talk about Beadwork, his filesystem-native, git-synced issue tracker built for AI coding agents. With 40 years of building software and cleaning up other people's messes, Jason has a sharp read on where agentic coding falls apart.
The conversation starts with Beads, the ticketing tool that inspired Beadwork, and why it eventually devolved into slop as it grew. Jason explains how coding agents lose the thread on long tasks through compaction and drift, and how a clean queue of tickets keeps an agent moving toward the right outcome instead of stitching back together the very thing it was told to tear out.
From there we get into how Beadwork is built: a git-synced design backed by an orphan branch that sidesteps the merge conflicts that made earlier tools painful for teams and work trees. Jason walks through breaking large changes into epics and issues, pausing the agent to catch drift, and the parts of the job an agent still can't do, like architecture decisions, taste, and judgment.
We also cover raising the quality bar on agent output, the efficiency argument around tokens, multi-project and team workflows, and the prompts Jason reaches for to get better plans. If you write code alongside an agent every day, this one is full of practical, common-sense workflow advice you can put to use right away.
Resources Mentioned:
- Beadwork:https://github.com/jallum/beadwork
- Bedrock (from last time):https://github.com/bedrock-kv/bedrock
Connect with Jason:
- X/Twitter:https://x.com/mullaj
- GitHub:https://github.com/jallum
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps:https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io:https://paraxial.io
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor:https://elixirmentor.com

In this episode of the Elixir Mentor Podcast, I talk with Tjaco Oostdijk, a drummer turned Elixir developer now working at DPG Media, one of the largest media companies in the Netherlands. Tjaco played drums professionally from the age of seven and has taught for 22 years, before landing in software through a music distribution company writing Ruby and eventually moving to Elixir nearly a decade ago.
We get into what it takes to keep Elixir running inside a large enterprise. DPG adopted Elixir after a high-traffic Ruby service fell over at scale, and Tjaco describes the reality of working in a locked-down environment standardized on Kotlin, using Copilot with Anthropic models while waiting for Claude Code to be approved. He also talks about the colleagues who stay skeptical of AI tooling and why that skepticism can be healthy.
The heart of the conversation is muziekles.app, the application Tjaco built for Dutch music teachers to run their entire teaching practice, from year-long scheduling and student accounts to homework and assignments. He explains why he deliberately keeps payments out of the product, how he thinks about onboarding teachers, and the build process using Phoenix, Ash, Claude Code, and Tidewave. We also compare notes on shipping side projects fast, multi-tenancy in Ash, and the differences between hardware and software work.
If you are building with Elixir inside a company that hasn't standardized on it, or shipping a side project with AI tooling, this conversation is full of practical, hard-won lessons from someone doing both at once.
Connect with Tjaco:
- Website:https://drumusician.com
- X / Twitter:https://x.com/drumusician
- GitHub:https://github.com/drumusician
- LinkedIn:https://www.linkedin.com/in/tjaco-oostdijk
Resources Mentioned:
- muziekles.app:https://muziekles.app
- Tidewave:https://tidewave.ai
- Vocablo:https://vocabloapp.com
- Kabisa:https://kabisa.nl
Sponsors:
- BEAMOps:https://beamops.co.uk
- Paraxial.io:https://paraxial.io
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
- Elixir Mentor:https://elixirmentor.com

Peter Ullrich returns to talk about a CVE hunt across the most-downloaded Hex packages, run with Claude Code on Opus 4.7. After ElixirConf EU pulled him into AI security, he started pointing Opus at popular libraries day and night, and within half an hour of his first serious attempt he found the Decimal vulnerability, where raising 10 to a huge power can blow up an application's memory.
We get into what separates a real CVE from noise, how CVSS scoring works, and why reachability matters so much, since a flaw in Phoenix's default config matters far more than a crash in a function nobody can call. Peter also walks through the process he runs with the EEF: verifying each issue, getting a second pair of eyes, coordinating a fix, and getting a number issued through a CNA, without sending slop reports to maintainers. We also touch on regulation and breach reporting.
We also cover how Opus compares to Mythos, why Peter keeps coming back to Claude, his first impressions of Opus 4.8, and the economics, with a simple scan costing about $10 in API tokens. He also shares his Session Watcher plugin, an update on Killswitch and its browser-side encryption, thoughts on AEO, and how he uses dev containers to sandbox coding agents.
Resources Mentioned:
Peter's blog post: peterullrich.com/what-the-cve
Peter's prompts: gist
Scrutineer: github.com/alpha-omega-security/scrutineer
Decimal advisory: GHSA-rhv4-8758-jx7v
EEF CNA published CVEs: cna.erlef.org/cves
EEF CNA security policy: cna.erlef.org/security-policy
Responsible disclosure guidelines: security.erlef.org
Anthropic article: red.anthropic.com
Connect with Peter:
Website: peterullrich.com
GitHub: github.com/pjullrich
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pjullrich
Bluesky: @peterullrich.com
Sponsors:
BEAMOps: beamops.co.uk
Paraxial.io: paraxial.io
SUPPORT ELIXIR MENTOR
Elixir Mentor: elixirmentor.com