The Agentic CTO

Fruition’s First AI Thursday: Excitement, Experiments, and a Few Letdowns

Fruition just wrapped its very first AI Thursday — a full day for engineers to explore, build, and experiment with AI tools — and the results were electric. Elliott shares how morale soared, a backend engineer spun up an MCP server to let customers chat directly with their personal finance data, and ChatGPT 5 impressed with its speed and reasoning. Not every tool was a hit (Gemini, we’re looking at you), but experiments with Claude Flow and Cursor’s model-switching feature showed real promise. Hits, misses, and lessons learned from a day dedicated to AI innovation.

Breaking the QA Bottleneck: How AI is Speeding Up Testing

QA teams everywhere are feeling the squeeze — dev velocity is up, but testing can’t keep pace. In this episode of The Agentic CTO, Elliott and his AI co-host break down how Fruition is tackling the QA bottleneck with practical AI workflows. From generating test cases and tracing bugs with Windsurf to using custom GPTs and Git Diff Inspectors, they share how AI is cutting triage time, prioritizing work, and freeing QA to focus on high-value testing. The takeaway? AI isn’t replacing QA — it’s giving them the caffeine boost they need to keep up.

Why AI Agents Love the Backend

AI agents thrive on structure—and that’s exactly why they dominate backend code and flail in the frontend. In this episode, Elliott Beaty and Tom Edison break down the technical and cultural reasons AI tools handle APIs like pros but panic over pixel alignment. From CSS chaos and visual quirks to backend bandaids and engineering team norms, we explore why frontend remains the final boss for AI and how teams can start leveling up their agents.

Seeding AI Culture on Your Engineering Team

In this episode, we walk through a step-by-step strategy for helping your engineering team not only accept AI, but actively embrace it. Whether you’re already experimenting with AI tools or just starting to dip your toes, this episode will show you how to get buy-in, build early momentum, and create sustainable internal tooling—all without blowing up your roadmap.