1 rich Libsyn https://www.libsyn.com 90 600 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. Software Engineering Radio - the podcast for professional software developers https://www.se-radio.net <iframe title="Libsyn Player" style="border: none" src="//html5-player.libsyn.com/embed/episode/id/41196920/height/90/theme/custom/thumbnail/yes/direction/forward/render-playlist/no/custom-color/88AA3C/" height="90" width="600" scrolling="no" allowfullscreen webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen oallowfullscreen msallowfullscreen></iframe> https://assets.libsyn.com/secure/item/41196920