What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much?
They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
171–180 of 498 posts
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#172> Monthly API costs per engineer ranged from $500 to $2,000 as adoption skyrocketed across the company. That's...not exactly a lot per engineer. It sounds like they just didn't budget correctly. Especially if the net of that work is more features that would have otherwise required hiring more engineers, which would cost a lot more than $500 to $2000 a month.
Its a lot. Its a lot for being able to generate that many tokens.
And i'm not talking about some genies 10x developer who is working with multiply git worktrees on x tasks in parallel in high quality
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Begs the question if we should move on to minimal microservices so that whole project lives in context of llm. I hardly have to do anything when I'm working with small project with llm.
Why not take it a step further? Make each function in the codebase its own project. Then the codebase can fit into the context window easily. All you have to do is debug issues between functions calling each other.
Wait, is this a joke about Lambda?
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#174this is pointless without knowing what they are measuring. you could genuinely moving faster or you could be optimizing for engineers in a rat race to push more code because all their peers are now doing it because those are the metrics you are measuring for "ai productivity".
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#175I 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 have ancedotal examples of claude code choosing a solution to a problem that is ridiculously token inefficient.
One example - was giving several agents different sub problems to solve in a complex ML / forecasting problem. Each agent would write + run + read a jupyter notebook. This worked ok, the notebooks would be verbose but it was fine... until one of them wrote out hundreds of thousands of rows to a cell output, creating a 500MB ipynb file. Claude tried several times to read it and it used my entire context limit.
The solution was to prescribe a better structure of doing the world (via CLI analysis scripts + folders to save research results to). But this required some planning, thought, and design work by me the operator.
When I see people spending $10k a month in tokens, I can only assume they are taking lazy hands off approaches to solving problems with the expensive hammer that is claude code. EX: have claude read all your emails every day... the lazy solution is to simply do that, but a smarter solution is to first filter the email body HTML to remove the noise.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#176I 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 have to churn to get to my ChatGPT Plus $20 plan limits with gpt-5.5 xhigh. Starts to feel like I'm doing something wrong.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#177No mention of if it actually improved outcomes.
That's not the point silly goose.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#178I 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…
It really depends on the way you use AI. If you just prompt it for a task and either accept or reject the output, you won't spend much.
But if you are like me, you aggressively document and brainstorm before planning, you review that documentation with subagents, make modifications, you aggressively plan, you verify that plan with subagents,make modifications, have a large number of phases, planning again for each phase, writing tests to cover 100%, implement each phase, do intermediate and final code reviews with subagents, apply fixes, write final documentation and do all these in parallel, if you have multiple tabs in your terminal each running Claude Code for 10-12 hours a day, then $5000 per day is not much.
If you use Anthropic or Open AI subscription and you spend $1000 per month, you are not using AI much.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#179Wonderful, so when will I see novel features in my Uber app?
You can now reportedly book a hotel from the Uber app...which is totally a useful feature that I'm sure everyone will start to use /s https://investor.uber.com/news-events/news/press-release-det...
I didn't know this. There's a term for this--which everyone of us now know--enshitification.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm currently in repos where the context window required is so large that the output is almost always "wrong" for the problem at hand. Quite a few people at my company burn through tokens this way, and it certainly isn't providing value to the company.
As always, improving accessibility for humans makes automation more effective. If the humans need to remember a PhD's worth of source code/documentation to contribute effectively, your codebase stinks.
People at my company have started writing docs specifically for claude. They're quite useful for me too, but kinda disappointing they never wrote these docs for their colleagues.