AI Consulting

I’m Brian Kirkby. I started programming as a kid, taught myself, and have been shipping software professionally for more than thirty years: Novell in the nineties, Adobe as a senior computer scientist, Zappos engineering, and a run as director of technology at a startup. I’ve seen a lot of technology waves arrive with big promises, and I’ve learned to tell the parts that hold up from the parts that don’t.

AI is the wave I’m most excited about, and the one where that judgment matters most. I work with it daily: language-model features, agents that do real work, prompt and evaluation design, and the unglamorous plumbing that makes all of it reliable. I’ve also spent years teaching the ideas underneath, including a talk on why we don’t really understand what neural networks are doing, which is exactly the kind of honesty you want from someone advising you on them.

What pushed me to start this business was a pattern I kept running into. As I talked with people outside of tech about what AI can do, most of them already knew it could help them. What they didn’t have was a starting point: which tools, for which parts of their work, and how to begin without burning weeks they don’t have. I started Pheirce Bytes to make the most of this AI moment on my own projects, and to give other people that jumpstart on theirs.

That’s who this page is for: the busy professional who wants to put AI to work and would rather skip the trial and error. I still design and build software end to end, so I can map out where AI fits, and then sit down and set it up with you. Every engagement starts with a free 15-minute conversation. From there we work in focused one-hour sessions, as few or as many as you need.