i bet someone mentioned openclaw one too many times
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
51–60 of 498 posts
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#52> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.
It's actually incredible the extent to which non devs imposing KPIs on devs underestimate how badly this will get gamed, whether it's AIs, PR/line counting or whatever.
Easily fixable with another KPI to measure the gaming itself :P
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#53I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…
In your fictional world you hire a junior who will write code manually, right? First , I interview people, Junior skills in manual coding dropped sharply this year. These are people who started they school manual and switched mid-course. In two years there will be no such people. well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves, especially for juniors. Junior that writes good code…
> well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves
The bubble is an echo chamber.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#54we run an agentic pipeline in a different domain (data sourcing) and the only
way the math works is to be ruthless about which stages actually need which model.
As a founder, the question I always have is "what is the marginal value per token relative to engineer-hours saved." More of a gut feel at the moment, but would be great to calculate.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#55I take a peak every month or so at spend for my company and notice more and more are consumed $1k in tokens a month and it is bewildering to me how. I use llms daily, and see anywhere from $200-$400 tops. This is using the most expensive models, in deep thinking mode. So I'm not a Luddite against the usage of them. I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. I genuinely challenge someon…
Claude is a mediocre programmer that can do great things with great supervision, but it can't make mediocre human programmers into good ones, because they can't provide great supervision. It will try and try and try, though.
id bet its the LLM doom loop: vaguely ask it to do something, tab to news.ycombinator.com for 30 minutes, tab back, noticed it misunderstood the prompt. Restart with new improved prompt, tab back to HN.
So yeah, probably the same thing people do anyway, just not compile time its now generating time.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#56> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.
I don't understand this critique. (1) Did you previously think you weren't getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do, aka what THEY thought was productive? (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless? Edit: y'all are some whiney folk, ain't ya?
GP just saying that any metric will be gamed and if you have some costs that is associated to that, it will grow. Let’s say you set some metric that says the most productive dev are the ones that has the most files changes, you can soon expect every function and structure to be its own file. Same if you say that sales commision are based on how much time you spend calling, expect the phone bills to grow a lot.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm on the same page. Do people not analyze the problems themselves? Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works? I don't get it.
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works? That is exactly what they are doing, yes
That's my take as well. I've had my unPRed branches grabbed up and blindly merged by an agent twice now. The guy doing it was shocked both times that his PR had my change sets in it.
Also one engineer is treating the code as assembly. I've asked some pointed questions about code in his PR and the response was "yeah, I don't know that's what the agent did".
Edit:
To everyone freaking out about the second guy. Yeah, I think being unable to answer questions about the code you're PRing is ill advised. But requirement gathering, codebase untangling, and acceptance testing are all nontrivial tasks that surround code gen. I'm a bit surprised that having random change sets slurped up into someone else's rubber stamped PR isnt the thing that people are put off by.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#58> 95% of Uber engineers now use AI tools monthly with 70% of committed code originating from AI. Well, that’s to be expected when using AI tools becomes relevant in your performance evaluation.
I don't understand this critique. (1) Did you previously think you weren't getting paid for doing what a company wants you to do, aka what THEY thought was productive? (2) Do you think all this AI generated code is useless? Edit: y'all are some whiney folk, ain't ya?
I think parent is saying "% of code being generated by AI" is not a generally good, direct metric for business value. It's akin to the "we are pushing SO MUCH CODE" phase of early ai marketing.
If we're trying to measure the value of adopting tool, it's probably better to measure the ROI of that tool rather than the usage % of that tool, especially when usage is basically mandated.
To directly answer your questions:
1. You're being paid to create value for the business, which "doing what they think is productive" is a proxy for. You're not being paid to use a tool a high % of the time.
2. I doesn't seem like parent even commented on the quality of the code generated. I think anyone that uses it regularly can agree that: a) the code is not useless and b) all generated code is not immediately production ready c ) AI generation of code is an accelerant for software development
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#59I love how these articles drop, and all of a sudden HN is filled with people who think engineering productivity is simple to measure.
Yes, productivity implies revenue (or cost reduction), and revenue is measurable.
However:
1. You spend money today to build features that drive revenue in the future, so when expenses go up rapidly today, you don’t yet have the revenue to measure.
2. It’s inherently a counterfactual consideration: you have these features completed today, using AI. You’re profitable/unprofitable. So AI is productive/unproductive, right? No. You have to estimate what you would’ve gotten done without AI, and how much revenue you would’ve had then.
3. Business is often a Red Queen’s race. If you don’t make improvements, it’s often the case that you’ll lose revenue, as competitors take advantage.
4. Most likely, AI use is a mixture of working on things that matter and people throwing shit against the wall “because it’s easy now.” Actually measuring the potential productivity improvements means figuring out how to keep the first category and avoid the second.
This isn’t me arguing for or against AI. It’s just me telling you not to be lazy and say “if it were productive you’d be able to measure it.”
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#60According to [1], there are about 5500 people in Engineering at Uber. Using $1250 as the mid-point of the $ spend range, that comes to about $6.8 Million in engineering AI spend, ballpark, with the range being $2.75 Million - $12 Million. The article lists $3.4 Billion as the R&D spend. The AI spend does not appear to be a significant chunk of R&D spending (0.3% in 4 months or 1% annualized). If they didn't plan for…
The actual source https://www.theinformation.com/newsletters/applied-ai/uber-c... says "about 11% of real, live updates to the code in its backend systems are being written by AI agents built primarily with Claude Code, up from just a fraction of a percent three months ago" and "He wouldn’t disclose exact figures of the company’s software budget or what it spends on AI coding tools."