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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

#191

Post by paulsutter »

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 working on some serious data analysis + realtime async code, and I use 200-400 million tokens a day with Claude Code alone (via ccusage). The complexity of the code seems to have a big impact on the number of tokens used. On simpler projects I use many fewer tokens.

My programming endurance is much greater now (2-3x focused hours per day), my productivity per hour is multiples higher, and I code seven days a week now because it's really exciting.

All told, I would pay for these tools as much as I would pay for full-time human programmer(s).

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

#192

Post by Anon1096 »

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 fully loaded cost of a senior engineer is already well past 400k. +5k a month is not that much if it helps them be XX% more productive. Personally at a different big tech I'm in the mid 4 digits AI spend per month and it helps me a lot, basically all coding has been trivialized and I work on an extremely large codebase. I'm spending more time on things closer to direct value generation like data analysis and experiment tweaking rather than spending time moving a variable across 10 layers of abstraction and making sure code compiles.

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

#193

Post by rconti »

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.

Could be negative! All it shows is that Uber is probably incentivizing token usage just like so many other companies are.

You get what you measure.

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

#194

Post by iLoveOncall »

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…

It's easily explained. People are losing their skill in real time and literally cannot develop anymore without AI. That's it.

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

#195

Post by wahnfrieden »

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…

You are probably guiding them step by step and reading the results. Maybe you also sit and wait for the results.

Agents can iterate on a problem for hours if they can see their results and be given a higher level goal to evaluate their progress toward.

When you have an agent working for minutes or hours, never wait on it. Use that time to spin up another agent.

You can also spin up several agents in parallel to attempt the same item of work and compare their results to choose which to work off for next steps, instead of rolling the dice on a single option at a time and gambling that it's better to refine that first attempt instead of retrying from the start several more times.

And if you are doing manual QA manually, you're missing out on having e.g. Codex's "Computer Use" or "Browser Use" automate your manual verification steps and collecting a report for you to review more quickly. Codex can control multiple virtual cursors simultaneously in the background without stealing focus, to parallelize this.

If you want to use up more tokens to get more done (though more outside of your control and ability to review of course), that's how.

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

#196

Post by monooso »

> Uber's unexpected budget burn matters because it signals how valuable AI tools have become to engineering productivity.

This infers value from spend, which makes no sense. Burning the budget tells us engineers like the tool, not that it's producing value.

Show me how to make two dollars whilst spending one, and budget isn't a problem.

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

#198

Post by blmarket »

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.

You should.

If it manages to solve the working solutions - then it's great! why would you waste your time on it?

It it fails - then it's great! you find your value by solving the ticket, which can be a great example where human can still prevail to the AI (joke: AI companies might be interested to buy such examples)

(All assuming that your time cost is pricier than token spending. Totally different story if your wage is less than token cost)

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

#199

Post by fragmede »

fg137 wrote: post #111
orf wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not every change a developer makes increases revenue, and the changes that do often have a lag time.

I'd argue it's often the contrary -- since it's easy to ship features and fixes, people often ship things without questioning if it makes business sense to support a use case, or if the design is solid. Now you have exactly the same revenge but more things to maintain

What if you're the SRE and the code fixes mean the site goes from 99% uptime to 99.9% up? How do you measure the revenue from that?

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

#200

Post by woah »

bakugo wrote: post #162
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.

Since AI has become a partisan political football it makes sense
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