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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

#391

Post by bs7280 »

bostik wrote: post #377
bs7280 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... To be fair, I do that. 2-3 times a day, in fact. Not all of my emails (the archive has ballooned to several hundred thousand messages total), but the most recent ones certainly. My standard prompt is along the lines of "go through the last N days of my emails, identify all threads that I need to know about, action on or follow up with". N is usually a number between 2 a…

This is a good example of doing it in a deliberate way that absolute is worth the tokens etc... especially when you are keeping tabs on the cost vs time saved.

The example I was thinking of would be a vibe coder having it "read my emails every hour" only for claude to read the same 1000 emails over and over...

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

#392

Post by jcgrillo »

pier25 wrote: post #214
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…

> You spend money today to build features that drive revenue in the future Totally but new features in their app or better software are not going to increase Uber's revenue/profit significantly.

This is the message that somehow the tech industry is constitutionally incapable of absorbing. The "innovation impulse" is cancer. I have no idea why tech managers keep harping on about "innovating", it's so bizarre.

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

#393

Post by bs7280 »

52-6F-62 wrote: post #230
bs7280 wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I should of emphasized it better in my comment but, the nuance of "read all my emails every day" as a prompt can yield a wildly different solution than "read recent emails every day". The first may literally read all your emails over and over, which is a ton of tokens for little gain. The latter is orders of magnitude fewer tokens with the same if not more productivity.

The difference here is just one word in the prompt, but serves as an example of how just a little but of deliberate thought in one's prompt can yield massive efficiency in outcome.

Whats wild to see both online and at work, non engineers given vibe code like tools will quickly show their ignorance to the importance of deliberate design and need for specific instructions one learns via coding. The "missing semi colon" meme is an example of the intuition we all developed early in our coding careers.

Many people are hoping AI can build and design for them, when in reality the deliberate design choices up front are as important if not more so than before AI.

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

#394

Post by skirmish »

codebolt wrote: post #232
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.

Not what I do. I'll reformulate the ticket description so that the purpose and as many details as possible about the solution are made clear from the start. Then I tell Opus to go and research the relevant parts of the codebase and what needs to be done, and write its findings to a research.md file. Then I'll review that file, bring answers to any open questions and hash out more details if any parts seem fuzzy. When…

You are making it too hard on yourself. Most people would just paste the ticket URL and type "fix this", then spend the next 3 hours on social media.

OTOH, I try hard to provide all possibly relevant context, manually copy/paste logs to reduce context overhead, always ask to produce an implementation plan and review it before making any code changes. Yet I often feel like a dinosaur here, all coworkers who tout "LLM productivity" just type a few words in and let the agent spin for hours without any guidance.

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

#395

Post by ebiester »

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_,…

Missing here: some organizations were rewarding high token usage as productivity without critical evaluation. People were afraid to be in the bottom because outcomes weren't being measured.

It is a giant Goodhart's law lesson

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

#396

Post by malisper »

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've been working on a project to build a new Postgres based database in Rust[0]. I'm four weeks in and have 93% of the Postgres test suite passing. I've found agents to have worked really well for this as I have an existing codebase that has good architecture that I can point my agents at. It's also easy to debug as I can diff what my agents are doing and what Postgres is doing.

I've had to get multiple codex accounts, but there was a brief period of time where I tried API usage to see how expensive it would be. In about an hour I spent $650 of credits. I had codex estimate how much I would be spending if I was doing pure API usage and it estimated around $10k/week.

For context Postgres is 1M lines of C code. It's looking like pgrust will come out as less lines of code than Postgres and at peak I was adding over 100k lines of code in a day. I would estimate it would take a team of 5 software engineers at least 3 years to get to where I got in a month with a couple Codex subscriptions.

[0] https://github.com/malisper/pgrust

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

#397

Post by everforward »

pretzel5297 wrote: post #387
everforward wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SWE's are expensive; median salary is $133k (not counting health insurance, payroll taxes, etc). If you can shave off an hour of dev time with $40 in LLM credits, that's $26.50 cheaper than having them do it without. I'm not entirely convinced it works out that way so far, but that's the theory. Trying to bring down LLM costs is sort of a double-edged sword, because the dev needs to be cutting LLM costs by more than…

> If you can shave off an hour of dev time with $40 in LLM credits, that's $26.50 cheaper than having them do it without. This assumes that that hour shaved was used elsewhere productively which is not the case.

Yeah, that's part of why I said I'm not entirely convinced. 1 hours vs 2 hours is an unrealistic example. I do still think it can make sense, but the extra actual productivity is probably more in the vein of "getting an extra hour on a 10 or 20 hour project".

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

#398

Post by yunwal »

xienze wrote: post #303
esafak wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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"?

> I take the prompts to the AI so the manager doesn't have to! I have prompting skills!! This is honestly the mindset of the people on here who proudly proclaim that they haven't written a line of code in six months and are excited about what programming is "evolving" into. Naturally, _their_ AI skills aren't something that an "idea guy" can use to build a product without looping in a developer, so _his_ job is safe…

do you... honestly not believe that system design is real???

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

#399

Post by manquer »

jmkni wrote: post #239
Raed667 wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Entreprise gets you the written agreement that the data you send to Claude will never be used for model training

If I explicitly turn this off in Claude’s settings isn’t it the same thing?

Can they get 5000 people to do the same correctly on every reinstall and enforce it ?.

Small individual tasks become complex at scale , and that is why these enterprise contracts sell

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

#400

Post by manquer »

SoftTalker wrote: post #327
trjordan wrote: post #125

> figuring out if the company can afford this level of productivity at scale This is the thing that boggles my mind. They spent their budget. They have 4 months of data. What do they have to show for it? I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it. But are you saying that Uber made this tool available, urged everybody to use it, and is confused about what happens when it worked? It's one t…

> Are they out of ideas on what to build next, or something? Well, what is there for Uber to build next? They have their ride hailing platform. It works. They have adapted it for other kinds of delivery (food, groceries, "anything that fits in a car") What else is there in the "someone driving a car" space for them?

Car Fleets, professional freight logistics.

There is a lot of things to do in some driving a vehicle space . The other obvious business (that they exited) is self driving of course .

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