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Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

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Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#91

Post by tills13 »

tunesmith wrote: post #68

I think as it becomes more common for executives to think we can replace software engineering with agents, I wonder if they might be basing their decisions off of unrealistic perceptions of the average software engineer. I guess I'm mulling two somewhat contradictory senses: 1. You get out of it what you put into it. A savvy CTO might be incredibly excited by everything they can do with agents, and improperly think t…

> You get out of it what you put into it.

Beyond that, it's a force multiplier and it doesn't care if the force is positive or negative. Someone with poor software engineering principals can use AI to make an absolute mess quickly.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#92

Post by jcgrillo »

ageitgey wrote: post #13
woah wrote: post #5

It's very easy to blow through hundreds of dollars a session using API tokens especially with the 1m context if you aren't careful about clearing old context. At the same time the subscription will allow the same usage for hundreds of dollars a month. Either Anthropic is absolutely hosing API users, massively subsidizing subscriptions, or a little bit of both.

Anthropic has a very "interesting" business model where you get subscription pricing as long as you are under 150 employees. When you hit 151, you have to start paying API prices overnight for everyone, and your total bill instantly multiplies. They are getting you hooked on cheaper tokens, then raking you in when you get scale. I'm sure Uber gets a break on list price, but I doubt they are anywhere near <150 employe…

Yeah, it's basically the opposite of how "product-led growth" SaaS works. Generally pay-as-you-go pricing is expensive at scale, but attractive initially. So you start on a pay-as-you-go plan, but as you scale you end up transitioning off pay-as-you-go to a negotiated commit. I.e. you call sales and sign a contract. Anthropic basically flips that around backwards.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#93

Post by adi_kurian »

embedding-shape wrote: post #74
abuani wrote: post #17

I 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…

Codex quota is suspiciously high right now. Either way, the subscription plans are not sustainable, and perhaps less relevant to any discussion about corporate API use. The prosumer developer plans are an insane deal. It is a golden age right now and it will end. If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. My completely unfounded conjecture is that OpenAI is trying to grab developers back from Claude by burning $$$$.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#94

Post by ajross »

hvb2 wrote: post #62
ajross wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'd much rather hire a junior engineer who spends $100-$200/month I'd much rather hire a junior engineer at $1.20/hour too! Can you hook me up with your contract services provider? Obviously I know you're talking about AI costs only. But the idea of doing that analysis without looking at the salary of the person running the tool seems to be completely missing the point. Now, sure, there are legitimate arguments to…

> But, no, $100k/year absolutely doesn't need to be "justified" if it works. That's cheaper than the alternative, and markedly so. If you're trying to say that 100k is less than 200k, you're right. I don't see how any of that won't need to be justified. You can spend a lot of money and not get enough of a return...

FWIW, you're nitpicking a strawman. I put "justified" in scare quotes for a reason, qualified it with "if it works" (which is, quite literally, the definition of a justification) and put it immediately after a sentence enumerating a list of legitimate questions for debate (all of which would be part of any justification analysis).

You agree with me, basically.

The core point is that these very large AI bills are not actually large in context, as the pre-existing scale of expenses for software engineering are larger still and this at least promises to reduce those markedly.

To wit: argue about whether AI works[1] for software development, don't try to claim it's too expensive, it's clearly not.

[1] "Is justified" in the vernacular.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#95

Post by entropicdrifter »

swiftcoder wrote: post #29
entropicdrifter wrote: post #24

Earlier 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

It's bizarre to me that people being paid to use their brains with a job title including the word "engineer", which essentially means "clever thought thinker" in Latin, just offloading all of their thinking to a bot instead of just using it as a way to ensure clean execution and faster understanding of the structures of underdocumented projects.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#96

Post by esafak »

Mistletoe wrote: post #89
esafak wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To that last guy, as the manager I would say "What is it that you do here??"

“I’m the prompter.”

I take the prompts to the AI so the manager doesn't have to! I have prompting skills!!

I just can't make the joke work. There really are people that think they can get paid to press the agent's on button. How long before their checks stop clearing and it "just works itself out naturally"?

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#97

Post by throwup238 »

esafak wrote: post #64
Verdex wrote: post #57

Earlier 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??"

He signs the TPS reports.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#98

Post by maxdo »

sikozu wrote: post #84
maxdo wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

yes, and no. Everybody is trying to hunt junior unicorn, They exist , but the ratio is 1 out 30. For these people, AI is a real elevator of their career.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#99

Post by sailfast »

abuani wrote: post #17

I 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 addition to what folks are saying here about larger code bases and multiple features at once, there’s also the time requirement to be efficient. It takes time to be more efficient with token usage and it may not be worth it for some of these companies so… burn away until we start to get more data and then we’ll check in.

Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

#100

Post by [deleted] »

brokencode wrote: post #30
abuani wrote: post #17

I 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…

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.

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