Might as well get while the getting is good and Anthropic is subsidizing the cost of compute
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
81–90 of 498 posts
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#82I 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 c…
I mean, the option is not zero productivity or some productivity: it could be negative.
We doubt the productivity because we have enough experience with Claude Code to know that flooding your organization with that many tokens isn't just unproductive, it's actively harmful.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#83I am confused - what did they ship based on this spending? - it is totally alright to spend that money if it made significant progress in some area.
or did the engineers just chill and let claude take over daily duties? (this is also a benefit for employees in my opinion)
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves The bubble is an echo chamber.
I'm interviewing juniors. Their manual skills drops sharply, and that's for people who went to school in manual age, and maybe last year it stopped to be manual. Lets see what will be in a year or two lol
At this point do you even need to hire any juniors at all? It seems like there's a heavy reliance on AI agents and LLM especially for juniors. Is hiring a warm body that sits on a chair and prompts at a computer a good use of money?
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#85I 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.
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Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#86Earlier 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
To be fair, taking an average SWE at $160k/y, and spending $1k/m, and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me. They could be spending the time on design and planning and working on new things, figuring out how to save costs in optimizations. In fact for every soul sucking mechanical task you offload, the better of you are overall.
It’s not like AI is the first time this happened. CI/CD and extensive preflight and integration and canary testing is also a way of saving engineer time and improving throughput at the cost of latency and compute resources. This is just moving up the semantic stack.
Obviously as engineers we say “awesome more features and products!” but management says “awesome fewer engineers!” either way pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice. There’s no John Henry award.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#87I 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…
I spend 400-500 dollars per day during active development at this point. However with more aggressive task breakdowns I can spend ~5k per day.
These spend rates are in part due to operating on a larger code base. Operating on a larger code base means more time searching and understanding the code, tests, test output. They are also due to going all-in on agentic coding.
It can feel painfully slow to go back to coding by hand when for a dollar you can build the same functionality in a minute. Now do this with multiple sessions and you can see where the cost goes.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#88I 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…
> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. Same but in regards to quotas. I'm on the 200 EUR ChatGPT plan, so presumable have the highest quota, using the "most expensive" models, on highest reasoning, in fast-mode (1.5x quota usage) and after a full day of almost exclusively doing programming with agents, I still get nowhere close to hitting my quota. In fact, since I started using…
I am running a bunch of autoresearch loops that optimize various compilers and its pretty easy to burn through as much money as you want if you have a measurable goal and good tests.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#89Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
To that last guy, as the manager I would say "What is it that you do here??"
“I’m the prompter.”
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
Really depends on the repo you’re working in. If it’s very large, especially if the tool needs to refer to documentation for a lot of custom frameworks and APIs, you often end up needing very large context windows that burn through tokens faster. If it’s smaller or sticks with common frameworks that the model was trained on, it’s able to do a lot more with smaller context windows and token usage is way lower.
So if the AI could do the same work on huge codebases with far fewer tokens, would it be good or bad for the AI companies do you think?
It would be good for the first AI company offering this.