David Cramer
Co-founder & CPO of Sentry
The creator of Sentry now codes almost entirely through AI agents and shipped Seer, an AI debugger that root-causes and patches production errors — while staying pointedly “grounded in what models are and aren’t capable of.”
In his words
I’m grounded in what models are and aren’t capable of.
Software isn’t free, and if you want to turn an idea into a good product, it’s still a large (and often ongoing) time commitment.
Biography
David Cramer is the co-founder and chief product officer of Sentry, the application-monitoring and error-tracking platform he started as an open-source project in 2012 and grew into a company used by hundreds of thousands of development teams. He is a longtime, opinionated voice in the developer-tools world.
AI agents, with guardrails
Cramer has become one of the more visible practitioners of agentic coding, describing how he now builds software largely through tools like Claude Code and Cursor, and defaulting to faster models for most work. Sentry, meanwhile, shipped Seer — an AI debugger that reads a production error, identifies the root cause, and can hand a fix off to open a pull request.
What sets his enthusiasm apart is its sobriety. He is openly skeptical of the more breathless AI narratives, reminds readers that models have real limits, and insists that turning an idea into a good product “is still a large (and often ongoing) time commitment.” His posture is a working engineer’s: use the tools aggressively, expect them to be wrong sometimes, and keep judgment in human hands.
Where they stand in the war
Who backs them up
Sources & further reading
Canonical record: https://battlelines.ai/topic/david-cramer