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SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE

SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE

Software Engineering Radio - The Podcast for Professional Software Developers vor 3 Monaten

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53:57

Birol Yildiz, CEO and co-founder of iLert, joins host Kanchan
Shringi to explore how iLert built an AI SRE — an autonomous
agent for handling production incidents — and what the experience
revealed about building AI agents in the real world. Birol
explains why incident response is a fundamentally agentic
problem, where the unpredictability of novel incidents makes
rule-based runbooks insufficient and reasoning models essential.
He describes how the AI SRE evolved from an early browser-based
approach to its current architecture, built around two key
ingredients: reasoning models and the Model Context Protocol.

The conversation examines the four layers of the AI SRE in depth:
an orchestration layer that routes requests and abstracts model
providers; a knowledge layer built on plain text memory and
agentic search rather than vector databases; an evaluation
framework based on recorded live investigations replayed against
new model versions; and a human-in-the-loop constraint layer. The
episode concludes with practical advice for teams building
agents: own your context completely, avoid off-the-shelf
frameworks that obscure what enters the model, and get out of the
way of the reasoning model rather than over-prescribing its
steps.