“Brad is incredible to work with, and I wish I knew more about DevOps to truly appreciate the depth and breadth of his knowledge (from my viewpoint, it's immeasurable!) Nonetheless, I'd like to comment on three items in particular that stand out because of their rarity, as well as their importance in cultivating a top-notch engineering culture. First: Brad makes everyone around him more productive and more effective. I think that's the mark of a senior engineer and a quality I will constantly seek to emulate—Brad takes the efforts of his teammates, and multiplies their effects. Whether through software or systems, he consistently enables others to move faster and drive more business impact. Second: Brad never settles. He has the expertise to know when something (whether an app or our infrastructure) can be better, but beyond that—he drives action to ensure that it *becomes* better. Simply put, he walks the walk. While others might stop at "I wish this would be fixed," Brad is 10 steps ahead, improving or building the next system. Lastly: Brad is a great teacher. Most of what I know about DevOps I owe to Brad! I think this ties into my first point, and it comes as no surprise. Brad took the time to teach me about platform, infrastructure, and "how to fish." Because of this, I was able to be more independent (allowing Brad to help others), as well as teach other engineers on my team (thus, multiplying Brad's effects). Brad takes the time to "invest" in others, and because of that, the teams and company as a whole becomes better. Brad was great to work with, and I sincerely hope I get the chance to do so again. Thanks, Brad!”
Bradley Erickson
San Francisco, California, United States
671 followers
500+ connections
About
I specialize in constructing consumer-facing products supported by scalable…
Experience
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Stealth
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English
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Spanish
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3 people have recommended Bradley
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Siddharth Ramakrishnan
Cursor's new Composer model is (not so quietly) Chinese under the hood. Cursor shipped the new version of Composer as its "first in-house frontier coding model," optimized through RL for real coding tasks. Within days, users noticed Composer's hidden thinking was full of Chinese characters. Industry press connected the dots: both Cursor's Composer and Windsurf's SWE-1.5 appear based on Chinese large models (likely Qwen bases), fine-tuned and wrapped in US products. Community reaction is split. Some call it a major downgrade: slower and struggling with complexity. Others report speed gains and slightly better performance. So why is the reception so mixed? Gavin Leech's AI Tigers post (link in comments) shows that on fresh benchmarks, Chinese models lose around 21% performance compared to roughly 10% for Western models. They look closer on leaderboards than they perform on novel problems. The cost story is similar: 3-6x cheaper per token, but often requiring 2-4x more tokens, which shrinks the cost advantage fast. So why would Cursor make this trade? Because they're not trying to replace GPT or Claude. They're owning a narrow, high-volume behavior and squeezing it with fine-tuning. Cursor has massive amounts of product-specific data (traces, diffs, accept/reject signals) and can invest in the RL loop to extract value from a cheaper base. This is where Chinese and open-source models actually fit in the stack. They're a strong fit for narrow problems with abundant training signal: tab complete, inline edits, code transforms. They're a weaker fit as primary reasoning for high-stakes, long-horizon workflows. Frontier US models still dominate the second category. Chinese open-source is taking over the first. Composer's rollout is a case study in how powerful Chinese models have become, and a live demo of where their limits still show.
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John Gallagher
Structured Events in Rails! OMG! I've been waiting for this for ~4 years. Want to send *proper* structured events? Yeah. Me too. This is the most exciting development in observability for Rails in... ...well, forever. This opens the door to proper OpenTelemetry instrumented Rails apps... ...with a single subscriber and an intuitive interface. But it's way more than that - it allows us to instrument *business* events. Things like: * Order Processed * Customer Paid * Invoice Created I'm beyond excited about the direction the Rails team has gone in. * Decoupled the subscriber from the instrumenter * Aligned the API with the ridiculously good error reporting * Namespaces for events This will open the door to massive improvements in the observability of Rails apps. A HUGE thanks to Adrianna Chang for leading this effort and getting a huge feature into Rails that's critical for modern observability. Kudos! Comment below with your questions about how to use observability and I'll answer what I can.
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