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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

#161

Post by Aurornis »

embedding-shape wrote: post #74
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. 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…

> Same but in regards to quotas. I'm on the 200 EUR ChatGPT plan,

The API rates and monthly plan rates are not the same.

If you're using enough to justify the 200EUR plan (instead of the 100EUR plan), your use might actually be as high as some of the API bills discussed above.

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

#162

Post by bakugo »

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…

> I'm not a hater; I'm not a luddite. I have a $200 Max plan and I use it.

I'm glad to see we've reached the point of AI discourse at which anything that might be construed as criticism must be prefixed by "I'm also part of the cult, I'm not a non-believer, but" to avoid being dismissed as a heretic.

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

#163

Post by rconti »

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…

Many companies actively hide the cost from their employees.

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

#164

Post by tcoff91 »

dpark wrote: post #42
tcoff91 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The perverse incentives created by these AI leaderboards are crazy.

The leaderboards are dumb, but I understand the point of telling people not to worry about tokens and just use it. They are trying to get people to try it, to discover new uses without asking “is this worth testing”. It’s basically early R&D budget. Eventually these companies will decide it’s time to transition into efficient usage.

Yes I love that my employer says go wild with it. But I feel like the leaderboard is dumb.

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

#165

Post by conartist6 »

anon84873628 wrote: post #133
conartist6 wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if the AI could do the same work on huge codebases with far fewer tokens, would it be good or bad for the AI companies do you think?

Unquestionably good. They want a product that provides value anywhere it's tried so as to establish the reputation as a magic human replacement. Gaming consumption based pricing at this point would be quitting before the race is over. They can always tweak the pricing knobs later once the industry is fully hooked.

Right but what if the thing that made fewer tokens necessary also kneecapped the idea of making humans dependent on AI to write software.

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

#166

Post by jimbokun »

fidotron wrote: post #26
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.

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.

I think PRs is pretty good, IF

1. you sample a few to see that they are actually meaningful,

2. they go to prod and are validated without having to roll back.

Still needs to be managed. But it should be much easier for a manager to catch an engineer gaming PRs than something like AI use or lines of code.

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

#167

Post by solenoid0937 »

steveBK123 wrote: post #103
lumost wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spend 400-500 dollars per day during active development at this point. However with more aggressive task breakdowns I can spend ~5k per day. These spend rates are in part due to operating on a larger code base. Operating on a larger code base means more time searching and understanding the code, tests, test output. They are also due to going all-in on agentic coding. It can feel painfully slow to go back to coding…

Your reply answers how you are able to spend money, not if it is returning sufficient dollar value per spend.. > I genuinely challenge someone spending $5-$10k a month to demonstrate how that turns into $50-$100k in value.

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 themselves.

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

#168

Post by andai »

brokencode wrote: post #30
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…

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.

On larger repos it spends a lot of time just finding the one line of code that needs to change. (I have the same problem, as a human!)

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

#169

Post by AntiUSAbah »

maxdo wrote: post #45
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…

In your fictional world you hire a junior who will write code manually, right? First , I interview people, Junior skills in manual coding dropped sharply this year. These are people who started they school manual and switched mid-course. In two years there will be no such people. well, that will never happened anymore in this world unless we will go back to caves, especially for juniors. Junior that writes good code…

Puh not good signs at all.

I mean even the normal people we get in interviews have no clue, like 80% are just ignorant.

I stoped an interview after 5 minutes: when i asked what ls -ahl is doing, he started telling me how he vibe/ai codes stuff and thats his workflow. Okay if you don't know the basics, guess what? everyone can replace you or at least i'm not hiring you (i only told him thats not what we are looking for and thanked him)

we are doomed :D

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

#170

Post by BeetleB »

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…

First: There's the obvious "If the company is letting me do it, I'll be wasteful." This includes not clearing/compacting the context often. Opus now has a 1M context window, and quality is good to at least 200K. So each query is burning a lot of tokens until you clear/compact.

People have already mentioned the size/complexity of the codebase. I'm new to my team and the codebase isn't huge, but it's large enough that there are plenty of parts I have little understanding about. When I'm given a task, then yes, I definitely go to Claude and ask it to find the relevant parts of code so I can understand the existing workflow before even attempting to change it.

The downside is that I don't build expertise. But the reality is that with Claude, I can get the work done in 1 day that would take me 5 days of struggling, and if everyone is doing it, I can't be left behind. So I take the middle route - I get it done in 2-3 days instead of 1 so I can at least spend some time with the code.

Especially with AI, the rate at which code changes in our codebase is insane. So I built a tool that takes a pull request, and tells the LLM to go deep and explain to me what that pull request does. (Note: I'm not the reviewer, I just want to keep tabs on the work that is going on in the team).

And this is just the beginning. I haven't actually spent time to come up with more ways to use the LLM to help me.

My usage is similar to yours, but if I were fairly experienced with the code base, I'd do a lot more. I haven't asked, but I suspect there are people in my team who go over $1K/month.

As always, the bottleneck is proper testing and reviews.

Edit: I'll also add that for not-so-important code used within the company, I suspect most people are going full-AI with it. For my personal (non-work) code, I just let the AI code it all - the risk is usually very low (and problems are caught quickly). If someone is using the "superpowers" skill, then even for basic features you can burn lots of tokens. I usually start with 20-40K tokens and end up with 80-90K tokens when it's finished. Which means that many of the requests prior to completion were sending in close to 80K tokens. Multiply that with the number of queries, etc.

Wasteful, but if someone else is paying ...

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