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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

#181

Post by bonesss »

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…

It’s the same dilemma as old: it’s easier to teach a doctor UML than a coder Doctoring. But, critically, that’s about making doctor-facing IT systems not performing their skilled jobs.

Bringing code does not help, but a validated user story with flow diagrams, a UI suggestion, and a valid ticket could. That’s the bridge to gap.

Were I that CTO I’d explain that code carries liability, SWEs can end up in jail for malfeasance, fines, penalties, and lawsuits are what awaits us for eff-ups. “Coders” get fired if their code doesn’t work. Same speech to the devs, do exactly as much unsolicited Accounting as you wanna get fired for. Talk fences, good neighbours.

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

#182

Post by SatvikBeri »

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...

I actually do this, but that's mostly because our team reviewed all the existing autoformatters for the relatively obscure language we use, and either really hated the formatting or found that they actually introduced errors!

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

#183

Post by hliyan »

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…

The answer may be agentic loops that keeps cycling through the same problem again and again until they land on a non-erroneous outcome. Some people boast having multiple such agents working in parallel on different problems, tending to one while another is processing, perhaps not unlike the movie mad scientist who runs around the lab throwing switches while laughing maniacally at the prospect of his impending success.

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

#185

Post by adastra22 »

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…

There are tools that let you extract out what the API price would be for a subscription plan use. I typically have monthly runs that are on the order of $2k - $4k at API prices, despite paying a mere $200/mo to Anthropic.

Edit: Just checked with ccusage and I've been doing about $450/day for the last week. A bit more than usual, but I still haven't come close to weekly limits and never hit the 5hr rate limit.

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

#186

Post by jitler »

Animats wrote: post #171

What is Uber developing? They're an app and a car allocator back end. Both work OK. Why are they spending so much? They gave up on self-driving, so that's not it.

> Both work OK

If only. The optimizations they do on their matching algorithm has made the UX so terrible, I regularly use Lyft instead now.

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

#188

Post by solenoid0937 »

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.

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

#189

Post by kansface »

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 require speculative work to formulate. Plans take hours to days to a couple of weeks to write. Humans may review the plans or derived RFCs. Chiefly AI reviews the code (multiple agents with differing prompts until a fixed point is reached between them). Tests and formal methods are meant to do heavy lifting.

In my highest volume weeks, I ship low hundreds of thousands of lines of software not counting changes to deps.

> At a corporate level, I'd much rather hire a junior engineer

Any formulation of problem sufficient for a truly junior engineer to execute is better given to an agent. The solution is cheaper, faster, and likely better. If the later doesn't hold, 10 independent solutions are still cheaper and faster than a junior engineer.

There is no longer any likely path to teaching a junior engineer the trade.

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

#190

Post by zeafoamrun »

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…

The personal max and teams plan actually are an amazing bargain compared to the API PAYG cost you get with Enterprise. I guess they really need their Enterprise features though, otherwise they could just tell users to expense a $200 max sub. Enterprises gonna Enterprise.
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