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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

#311

Post by sidewndr46 »

Galanwe wrote: post #278
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. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

level 99 - They're using Gas Town

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

#312

Post by Xiol »

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…

You will burn yourself out in months at that level of daily context switching.

It isn't worth it.

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

#313

Post by joshuastuden »

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're basically arguing for massive headcount reductions.

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

#314

Post by hnthrow0287345 »

darth_avocado wrote: post #132
fidotron wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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://w…

>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.

That means nothing to them: they jump ship and find another job just like devs do. The whole industry has been musical chairs for a while.

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

#315

Post by fragmede »

i_love_retros wrote: post #159
ambicapter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at my job uses AI tools to reformat his code...

My coworker said he does that too. Also have coworkers using AI to run git commands. Nothing fancy either- just pull, push, merge etc

When Claude says "Shall I push it", it's way easier to just respond "yes" than it is to open a new terminal and run git push, and if you're being graded on how much AI tokens you use, saying yes looks even better for your metrics!

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

#316

Post by fnordpiglet »

Aurornis wrote: post #140
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…

> 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 sta…

Managers have processes for correcting for these behaviors and they fall into the second bucket of outcomes I mentioned.

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

#317

Post by aprdm »

steveBK123 wrote: post #245
solenoid0937 wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with HN is that everyone here thinks like an engineer, not like a business owner. $10k a month on tokens is just not that much when you're already making $2M per engineer. If their productivity has increased even 10% then the spend was well worth it. Case in point, Meta made 33% more revenue this earnings report. Now you can nitpick and ask for attribution down to the dollar, but macro trends speak for th…

Go look up a multi-year chart of their revenue and find the inflection point where the AI made it go up faster (there isn't). In fact revenue growth used to be higher pre-2023.

lol. AI just started in the kind of usage being discussed in this thread, how would it make any difference on something that is quarterly reviewed

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

#318

Post by Bayano2 »

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…

Related to 2, my company is strongly pushing for developer to have product mentality and be less of just a cog in a machine.

I am biased because I have more of a product mentality than other developers, but I think these are the people better positioned to be more productive with agents: know enough tech to be able to implement things with agents, and know enough product to know what should be implemented.

I expect other companies to follow.

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

#319

Post by pjc50 »

solenoid0937 wrote: post #188
internetter wrote: post #6

I know I'm responding to AI right now, but > which means figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale. If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question.

> If it was actually productive, then the revenue would increase and affordability wouldn't be a question. Revenue has increased. Have you seen Meta's latest earnings? +33% revenue - in this economy. Affordability is not a question. There is a reason companies like Meta have no issue with their engineers spending $1k/day on tokens. It's just not that much compared to how much they make per employee.

After losing 20 million users? https://www.theverge.com/tech/921089/meta-earnings-q1-2026-u...

I really don't understand their economics.

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

#320

Post by animuchan »

entropicdrifter wrote: post #24
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'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.

That'd be crazy. The agent has a skill configured to fetch ticket descriptions from Jira by itself. Copy-pasting feels like manual labor.
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