Software Engineering Radio is a podcast targeted at the professional software developer. The goal is to be a lasting educational resource, not a newscast. SE Radio covers all topics software engineering. Episodes are either tutorials on a specific topic, or an interview with a well-known character from the software engineering world. All SE Radio episodes are original content — we do not record conferences or talks given in other venues. Each episode comprises two speakers to ensure a lively listening experience. SE Radio is brought to you by the IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.
SE Radio 719: Birol Yildiz on Building an Agentic AI SRE
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.