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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

#221

Post by armandososa »

kansface wrote: post #189
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. I always have a few agents (2-5) doing research and working on plans in parallel. A plan is a thorough and unambiguous document describing the process to implement some feature. It contains goals, non-goals, data models, access patterns, explicit semantics, migrations, phasing, requirements, acceptance criteria, phased and final. Plans often…

I am sorry, I am probably just very dumb, but this sounds extremely wasteful. If this is a reflection of how software was made before AI I wonder how anything was ever made.

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

#223

Post by munk-a »

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…

[dead]

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

#224

Post by dymk »

andai wrote: post #173
mlsu wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

left-pad

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

#225

Post by p_stuart82 »

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.

yeah and once the KPI is "how much AI did you use" instead of "what did you ship," the budget blowout writes itself. people will game the number.

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

#227

Post by munk-a »

fhn wrote: post #218
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…

a good way to prevent companies from adopting AI (and keeping your job) is to waste tokens making AI cost prohibitive

That would be true in a sane world with investors who value profitability. But everything is now focused on DAU and the network effect. Overusing their services might actually make them look better to investors who shovel more money to them to light on fire.

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

#228

Post by swader999 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #116
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…

My friend is a CTO at a non-tech company and he's now dealing with code from non-SWEs trying to self serve with LLMs. But it's like a kid running a lemonade stand. Total DIY weekend project quality stuff that they are demanding go live. Hardcoded credentials, no concept of dev/qa/prod environments, no logging, no tests, no source control. I'm not really sure teaching basic SWE practices / SDLC / system design to peop…

No, you should have forward deployed engineers sitting and working right beside these traditional non SW roles if you need to fully integrate AI into their mix.

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

#229

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #95
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

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.

There's some people who are offloading all of their thinking to a bot, and I agree with you that I don't really understand this. But the good version of it is to offload some of your thinking to a bot so you can focus your own thinking on the parts that matter. My time is much better spent on "ah there is a scalability tradeoff here" than "I guess I have to initialize the FooBarProviderServiceProvider in a different spot so that I can pass a mock to the FooBarProvisionConsumer unit tests".

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

#230

Post by 52-6F-62 »

bs7280 wrote: post #175
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 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 outpu…

> have claude read all your emails every day

But that is exactly what it is sold to people to do as a panacea: consume all the data, produce insights.

Nobody is being instructed to be judicious. Everyone is being instructed to use it as much as possible for all problem areas.

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