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

#151

Post by vga1 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:28 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?

Resistance to technological change has been a thing since farming was invented. Socrates thought that writing will ruin everyone's memory, and that people who just rely on written word will appear knowledgeable while actually knowing nothing.

The only difference is that this is happening to us.

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

#152

Post by o10449366 » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

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 spent $24,096.47 in "API" costs with my $200 Claude Code Max subscription in April.

I'm building my own saas. I spent 6 months writing the code by hand before using Claude, and that was fine, but its much faster to give the exact specs to Claude and have 3-4 sessions working in parallel with me. When you validate changes with exact test specs there's much less correction you need to do. I always hit my weekly limit and it's far cheaper for me to use this than to hire someone and spend time onboarding them.

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

#153

Post by Aurornis » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #146

Aurornis wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience, the result is just more crawling across the separate microservices and additional reasoning to confirm how it all fits together. The monolithic codebases are easier to crawl for any problem that can't be conveniently isolated to a single microservice.

A good API should be documented, and AI should not have to read the internal code to understand how to use it.

Like I said, if your work is already contained neatly inside one microservice then it doesn't matter.

The same would be true in a monolith: The context to understand what's happening would be contained to a few files.

When the work starts crossing through domains and potentially requiring insight into how other pieces work, fail, scale, etc. then the microservice model blows up complexity faster than anything, even if you have the API documented.

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

#154

Post by retired » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

Have we reached a point yet where companies are spending millions a year on software licenses, cloud and AI to the point where the return isn't worth it?

Years ago I did work for a company that was spending over a million on Oracle product licenses and I was part of the consultant team they hired to rip it all out and just go for simple maintainable code based on open source products. Not only did it transform into a codebase that the average newly hired developer could maintain, you also had the savings of not paying Oracle a significant portion of your revenue.

I feel like that will repeat itself in a few years time with the current cloud and AI train everyone is on.

I haven't been in a professional setting for a while, I just code for fun nowadays so perhaps I'm somewhat out of the loop.

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

#155

Post by Cyphus » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #115

> Uber's unexpected budget burn matters because it signals how valuable AI tools have become to engineering productivity That's a bit of a logical leap with no demonstrable increase in productivity. All this shows is that they're spending a lot more on AI than they budgeted for. Nothing else.

I think the tech industry in general is taking advantage of the fact that software productivity is hard to quantify to say whatever they want about their AI productivity gains. Apparently we are past the point of having to justify anything and can just equivocate increased AI spend with success.

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

#156

Post by AnimalMuppet » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

If someone sends a bot to a meeting, warn them the first time. Fire them the second, for exactly the reason that you said in your last paragraph: They're pushing their work onto other people.

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

#157

Post by phillipcarter » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

> 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.

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

#158

Post by hadlock » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

quaintdev wrote: post #105

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.

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.

I've done the opposite, moving multiple tightly coupled repos into a single monorepo. Saves the step of the llm realizing there's a bigger context, finding the repo, then also scanning/searching it. Especially for fixes that are simply one line each in two repos.

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

#159

Post by i_love_retros » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:30 PM UTC

ambicapter wrote: post #113

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.

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

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

#160

Post by hliyan » Fri, May 01, 2026, 5:30 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 inexplicably change the meaning of the book or document being typeset? Do compilers alter the behavior intended by the programmer, sometimes in ways that are not immediately obvious? Did the invention of typesetters lead to investments so massive, that the investors had to herald the end of handwriting (no equivalent analogy for compilers)?