Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

techcrunch.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 53 posts

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#41

Post by zoogeny »

josefritzishere wrote: post #40
zoogeny wrote: post #36

This is a contrarian view and I am a biased AI-maximalist. But I actually think these kinds of results are genuinely important. There is a lot of frustration and even anger over CEOs pushing AI onto employees and some schadenfreude when it goes wrong. But there is some element of "fail fast" happening here. I am glad wealthy corporations are footing the bill by stretching this technology to its limit. The fact of the…

I have a feeling it's not going to be magic and will obey the laws of Supply and Demand like all other tech products; further that it's hugely over valued and is going to crash like a meteor before it's over. But we'll all find out together, right?

Yes, right now all we have are vibes/feelings. My point was that one benefit of the hype and the "CEO psychosis" is that we'll find out together fast. Uber, and companies like it, have the money to take the kind of risk that accelerates learning.

And the first data point is in your favor, kind of. I mean, Uber engineers were sufficiently incentivized to use the tokens they were given. It isn't easy to determine what the exact motivation was. What might result from this latest round of CEO backtracking is either relief (don't have to pretend to use AI anymore) or frustration (upset at a useful tool being taken away).

There are two possible stories here. One, they forced everyone to use AI and didn't get enough benefit to justify the cost. Two, they gave the opportunity to their employees to use unlimited AI and those employees jumped at the chance with a vigor that management didn't expect.

All we really know is that value per token must have been low enough to cause this change.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#42

Post by socketcluster »

tsvetkov wrote: post #18
socketcluster wrote: post #4

It makes me wonder about the state of their codebase if devs needs to consume more than $1500 per month. It's interesting that AI is finally forcing businesses to think about coding maintenance costs though. When I started working on https://saasufy.com/ as a dev tool many years ago, I was frustrated that no big company cared about software maintenance costs and I really couldn't imagine a world where maintenance cos…

Why do you think the cap has anything to do with the quality of their codebase? Employees could've been tokenmaxxing for various reasons: learning, experimenting, trying to impress the management, ... Naturally, this leads to AI spending skyrocketing while the business value may not be totally clear. Which leads to caps being introduced to keep the budget under control and discourage/limit tokenmaxxing.

It's based on my experience as a software engineer who has worked on both clean and messy codebases with AI.

It's a very different experience with a messy codebase. In this case, the agent spends most of its time trying to gather the relevant context and it's like a game of whac-a-mole. The agent burns through tokens and can take a long time to resolve the issue with a lot of human intervention required. I would say it takes possibly just as long or longer than a human engineer would. Also, psychologically, the temptation for the engineer to trust the AI is massive because they don't want to load themselves up with all that ugly, complex context. They are more likely to let the agent create more hacks on top.

On a relatively well-structured codebase with loose coupling and high cohesion, the experience is usually very positive, mind-blowing, even; because it feels like the agent is reading your mind and fast-forwarding you. You don't need to correct it as much. And when you do, it's usually minor things.

The first case represents a net loss of value because tech debt is being added and compounding the complexity each time a problem is 'solved'. On the other hand, the second case is a significant speedup, for me, I would say it's at least a 5x speedup. I love using AI in this way. I'm in control and not at the mercy of the agent.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#43

Post by _fat_santa »

At my company we're using Claude Code w/ API Billing and I found that unless you're running ralph loops on Opus with extended thinking, it's very hard to blow through more than $200/mo.

I made this argument earlier and I'll make it again, I think a major contributing factor to AI budgets exploding is the token leaderboards, culture of "tokenmaxxing" and the the constant narrative that if you're not burning X tokens a month, you're not a good engineer.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#45

Post by tsvetkov »

socketcluster wrote: post #42
tsvetkov wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think the cap has anything to do with the quality of their codebase? Employees could've been tokenmaxxing for various reasons: learning, experimenting, trying to impress the management, ... Naturally, this leads to AI spending skyrocketing while the business value may not be totally clear. Which leads to caps being introduced to keep the budget under control and discourage/limit tokenmaxxing.

It's based on my experience as a software engineer who has worked on both clean and messy codebases with AI. It's a very different experience with a messy codebase. In this case, the agent spends most of its time trying to gather the relevant context and it's like a game of whac-a-mole. The agent burns through tokens and can take a long time to resolve the issue with a lot of human intervention required. I would say…

I don't argue against the fact that codebase complexity increases token consumption on building context. My main point was that there are other factors affecting token consumption beyond just codebase complexity. Some of them may be related to engineering culture (verbose logs, flaky tests, lack of docs, weird hacks all over the place, etc.), some of them are organizational/social.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#46

Post by socketcluster »

cactusplant7374 wrote: post #7
socketcluster wrote: post #4

It makes me wonder about the state of their codebase if devs needs to consume more than $1500 per month. It's interesting that AI is finally forcing businesses to think about coding maintenance costs though. When I started working on https://saasufy.com/ as a dev tool many years ago, I was frustrated that no big company cared about software maintenance costs and I really couldn't imagine a world where maintenance cos…

If for each story the developer needs to fetch context for 10's of micro services I could see them using a lot of tokens.

True. I've worked on projects which required updating 3+ repos for each feature. Required carefully-timed staggered deployments.

It's often a sign of poor separation of concerns. Tight coupling and low cohesion.

On a good codebase with microservices, this should happen on rare occasions, but not every single time you add a new feature. Been there. Agreed those are particularly hard to work with using AI.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#47

Post by socketcluster »

tsvetkov wrote: post #45
socketcluster wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's based on my experience as a software engineer who has worked on both clean and messy codebases with AI. It's a very different experience with a messy codebase. In this case, the agent spends most of its time trying to gather the relevant context and it's like a game of whac-a-mole. The agent burns through tokens and can take a long time to resolve the issue with a lot of human intervention required. I would say…

I don't argue against the fact that codebase complexity increases token consumption on building context. My main point was that there are other factors affecting token consumption beyond just codebase complexity. Some of them may be related to engineering culture (verbose logs, flaky tests, lack of docs, weird hacks all over the place, etc.), some of them are organizational/social.

Sure. A lot of these things tend to go together. Weird hacks is a bad one. Those AI agents love to cheat and if they see highly elaborate hacks in the code, they won't hold back either.

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#48

Post by uggghhhhh »

zoogeny wrote: post #36

This is a contrarian view and I am a biased AI-maximalist. But I actually think these kinds of results are genuinely important. There is a lot of frustration and even anger over CEOs pushing AI onto employees and some schadenfreude when it goes wrong. But there is some element of "fail fast" happening here. I am glad wealthy corporations are footing the bill by stretching this technology to its limit. The fact of the…

> I am a biased AI-maximalist

When oh when will HN develop shame?

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#49

Post by TurdF3rguson »

_fat_santa wrote: post #43

At my company we're using Claude Code w/ API Billing and I found that unless you're running ralph loops on Opus with extended thinking, it's very hard to blow through more than $200/mo. I made this argument earlier and I'll make it again, I think a major contributing factor to AI budgets exploding is the token leaderboards, culture of "tokenmaxxing" and the the constant narrative that if you're not burning X tokens a…

You're supposed to be burning tokens out of spite like the rest of us. What are you trying to get us all fired?

Re: Uber caps employee AI spending after blowing through budget in four months

#50

Post by andyferris »

Drakim wrote: post #12
andyferris wrote: post #10

I’m confused why a business would allow (non-data-science/agent harness devs) to pay per token instead of eg an Anthropic business premium seat? A monthly subscription seems pretty straight forward for the accountants, no?

You aren't allowed to use the same super cheap subscriptions if your company is big enough.

Oh wow! Team is still ok but Enterprise is excluded.

That’s… quite harsh. I don’t normally want to speak up for BigCorp but it seems like they are getting gouged.

Post reply on HN