I didn't see a bit where they said how this transformed into more productivity and more profit? What is the point in using AI to make developers more productive if you don't either have more features coded making more money, or fewer developers saving cost?
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
#262Not surprising, hit my 5h limit on Claude Code Max Plan, had some credits so switched to extended (api). 40 minutes later $30 credits gone... so yeah, I can see how this can happen.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#263Earlier quoted context omitted.
Codex quota is suspiciously high right now. Either way, the subscription plans are not sustainable, and perhaps less relevant to any discussion about corporate API use. The prosumer developer plans are an insane deal. It is a golden age right now and it will end. If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. My completely unfounded conjectur…
Codex quota is/was 2x its normal amount for some promotion or something. I thought it ran out today but can't check right now
Every time I read about codex it's someone saying the extra limits ended that day. I'm not saying you're wrong in this instance
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#264Earlier quoted context omitted.
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?
Depending if the site has a direct competitor and non-sticky customers, you can often get accurate loss estimates from outages. For example, friends of mine at Doordash would know when UberEats was down by the corresponding spike in traffic to their app. The competitor captures all the lost traffic.
Most enterprises will have a harder time quantifying losses, as some percentage of customers will come back later. To understand that, you need to look for a drop in completed purchase rates compared to site visits.
For a SaaS, it's even more difficult, as customers are often held captive by long contracts and might tolerate SLA breaches up to a certain point. A reasonable, though fictional, proxy would be the revenue for the contract pro-rated against the uptime during that period.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#265Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#266Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s crazy that people don’t understand cached tokens despite them being priced separately on the cost pages of every single provider.
> It’s crazy that people don’t understand cached tokens despite them being priced separately on the cost pages of every single provider. Depends on your subscription type. Some are just a flat monthly fee.
Those aren't the people worrying about token counts, then.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#267Is this a submarine? https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html
It's funny how Paul is recommending people use PR firms, while in more recent videos michael seibel and others have strongly recommended against using them. It's interesting how things shift in ~20 years
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#268Earlier 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.
If you make 500k and aren't spending 250k in token, you should get fired.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#269I 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.
> Are they just copy/pasting their entire ticket description into Claude Code and having it iterate until they land on something that works?
There's also the pattern of creating an army of agents to solve problems. Human write a plan. One agent elaborates on it. Another reviews it and makes changes. Another splits it up into tasks and delegates out to multiple agents who make changes. Yet another agent reviews the changes, and on and on. All working around the clock.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#270I 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.
That means absolutely nothing in the context of this conversation. It says right in their release ad impressions are up almost 20% and cost per add is up 12%. Those two metrics alone account for most of the increase in their revenue. Absolutely no conclusion can be drawn regarding the impact of AI on those numbers one way or the other.
It's not like they used AI to crank out some new revenue generating piece of software, or massively reduce operating costs. In fact their operating costs rose by 35%.