Live data from Hacker News

Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

briefs.co

361–370 of 498 posts

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

#361

I don’t understand. On the ChatGPT pro plan for $200/month, I am essentially running it 24/7 including nights and I can barely get it under the 40% usage mark. Why are companies not using this?

when performance means using AI. is easy to make it happen

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

#362

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can that be attributed to any code an LLM wrote? >$8 billion of net income was the result of a tax benefit the company realized in the first quarter of the year. So exactly how much of their revenue is because of any code LLMs wrote vs. just structural tail winds?

You can always say "it's not because of LLMs", that's nearly unfalsifiable. But if all of your peers are saying LLMs are more productive, if you're building things faster than ever before, the macro picture speaks for itself.

I'm not asking to say "it's not because of LLMs" I am asking for evidence that LLMs are creating revenue for users.

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

#363
post #322

Speaking as someone who's bootstrapping here, I'm often envious of engineers at these larger companies, but I also worry that the incentives are screwed up. If I were an engineer at Uber, why wouldn't I select gpt 5.5 pro @ very high thinking + fast mode for a prompt? There's no incentive not to use the most powerful (and thus most expensive) model for even the smallest of changes. I tried one of these prompts for so…

Companies may first want to see how fast you can scale work and then trim it back down for efficiency.

How could they implement it? Try testing a bunch of models (closed and open sourced) and then seeing which one gives the best returns for it's cost? And then how do they check if it's being properly used, I have read of people just throwing their token budgets to the fire so that they show high usage for KPIs, while the most obvious cases of "X do this very wasteful thing" will be culled quickly (hopefully), I don't see how non-technical management can see through the thinnest layer of malicious compliance

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

#364
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 really depends on the way you use AI. If you just prompt it for a task and either accept or reject the output, you won't spend much. But if you are like me, you aggressively document and brainstorm before planning, you review that documentation with subagents, make modifications, you aggressively plan, you verify that plan with subagents,make modifications, have a large number of phases, planning again for each ph…

Are you bringing in at least $1.25M in additional yearly revenue to your company?

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

#366
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.

Well, if your bonus depends on spending it, you'll find a way.

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

#367
post #295
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…

If Uber is like most other companies, there's a leaderboard for AI tokens consumed. If maximizing your token usage is going to get you to the top of the leaderboard, and therefore promoted for "productivity", people are going to find creative ways to be "productive".

The tokenmaxxing leaderboard where I work has a lot of new hires on it

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

#368
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. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

I spend about $3k/month (subsidized by the Claude Max plan).

I guess I fall under level 3 (2?): I typically have 3-6 agents working simultaneously on the same feature, they each make worktrees, code, run tests and put up PR’s. I also have Github actions which scan for regressions and security issues on each PR.

It makes my development cycle extremely fast: I request a feature and just look at Github and look for changes to my human readable outputs, settle on a PR, merge, repeat.

The issue is that I am now the bottleneck in my system. I find myself working basically non-stop, because there is always more to do. (Yes I know I can automate the acceptance criteria but that turns to slop real fast)

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

#369
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. From my experience, this happens essentially by three means: - Level 0 (beginner users) long lived conversations: If you dont get in the habit of compressing, or otherwise manually forcing the model to summarize/checkpoint its work, you will often find people perpetually reusing the same conversation. This is especially true for _beginners_,…

I’m basically doing lvl 3. There’s not a single port in my local worktree’s .env that’s not guaranteed to be unique across all worktrees. Skills for agent to start their own managed dev server, launch their own isolated instance of chrome etc. literally end-to-end code and debug the entire app. I do have to say though you have to know the app inside out and have to have a pretty well groomed backlog in order to run them all in parallel and actually benefit from it.

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

#370
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…

Idk about Uber in particular, but aside from legit programmers using AI to help them do legit work faster, there are people spamming it for metrics. And the hiring pipeline has gotten screwed up somehow, like half the people who reached the onsite interview for a technical role lied about all their technical skills, or they didn't lie and manage to pass hiring but then only take the tasks that AI can solo. And if it can't, waste tokens until giving up.
Post reply on HN