Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months • Hacker News Board

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

#131

Post by entropicdrifter » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

swiftcoder wrote: post #102

fnordpiglet wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

> pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice If it were producing equivalent outcomes, sure. So far I haven't personally seeing strong evidence for that. LLMs do write code pretty competently at this point, but actually solving the correct problem, and without introducing unintended consequences, is a different matter entirely

This. LLMs are terrible at planning/architecture and maintaining clarity of vision across a project. There are lots of tools that mitigate these issues but they're going to keep coming up regardless because of the fundamental nature of LLMs.

If you're not doing the design of the solutions for problems as an engineer or at least making the decisions and owning the maintenance of that architecture/design, what even is your job at that point?

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

#132

Post by darth_avocado » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:17 PM UTC

fidotron wrote: post #26

MichaelNolan wrote: post #3

> 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.

Gaming is one thing, fundamentally not understanding how engineering works will lead to shittier outcomes and cost the company in ways the management will never understand.

Management in the age of AI is falling for the doorman fallacy wrt engineering. If lines of code were the most valuable aspect of software engineering, my front end JavaScript intern would’ve been the most valuable person in the company. https://www.jaakkoj.com/concepts/doorman-fallacy

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

#133

Post by anon84873628 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:18 PM UTC

conartist6 wrote: post #77

brokencode wrote: post #30

Earlier 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?

Unquestionably good. They want a product that provides value anywhere it's tried so as to establish the reputation as a magic human replacement. Gaming consumption based pricing at this point would be quitting before the race is over. They can always tweak the pricing knobs later once the industry is fully hooked.

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

#134

Post by storus » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:19 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #96

Mistletoe wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“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"?

That's literally how some Meta AI jobs looked a few years back - set up a few parameters, push a button, wait until training and evals are finished; repeat if. needed. $500k+/year.

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

#135

Post by mattas » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:20 PM UTC

Wonder how many tokens would be saved if everyone just put “be brief” in their prompts.

Also wonder if there is some perverse incentive for models to be verbose to juice tokens.

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

#136

Post by emp17344 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

hyperpape wrote: post #59

I 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…

Minor shifts in productivity are hard to measure. Major jumps in productivity would be obvious. I think it’s clear that, if AI is affecting productivity, it’s to a minor degree at best.

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

#137

Post by Painsawman123 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:21 PM UTC

If they burned through their ML budget in four months while using heavily subsidized models, we're going to see companies burn through their ML budgets in less than a week once those subsidies are no longer in place and they have to pay per tokens used.....

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

#138

Post by mrhottakes » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:22 PM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #112

sikozu wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So he's being paid and is sitting there letting an AI tool do his work for him? Insanity.

We didn’t mind when typesetting was automated. Or when compilers were invented. Why is this different?

Do typesetters or compilers write the code for you? Or are you perhaps using a disingenuous analogy?

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

#139

Post by fragmede » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

embedding-shape wrote: post #109

adi_kurian wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 conjectur…

> If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. Yeah, obviously, not sure why anyone would be using APIs at this point, seems bananas to spend more than 10 EUR per day when these "almost-endless" subscriptions exists. > My completely unfounded conjecture is that OpenAI is trying to grab developers back from Claude by burning $$$$. Unlikely,…

> miles and leagues ahead of Claude Code, pretty much from inception.

Can codex run background tasks yet? CC's ability to run a process in the background and monitor its output for errors while another process access that first process, is probably what got cc so popular for web development over codex to start with.

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

#140

Post by Aurornis » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:23 PM UTC

fnordpiglet wrote: post #86

swiftcoder wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ha…

> and offloading mechanical ticket work from their working set sounds like a bargain to me

Unfortunately the people who offload the work of understanding and interacting with tickets just end up offloading the consequences to everyone else who has to do extra work to make sure their LLM understands the task, review the work to make sure they built the right thing, and on and on.

The same thing happens when people start sending AI bots to attend meetings: The person freed up their own time, but now everyone else has to work hard to make sure their AI bot gets the right message to them and follow up to make sure what was supposed to happen in the meeting gets to them.