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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

#411

Post by 4ffg »

daheza wrote: post #390
risyachka wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Again, not necessarily bad in itself, yeah, it is bad. Human brain is not able to properly assess this amount of changes. To understand even a small change you need a lot of capacity. To understand thousands of lines - impossible. This is pure slop pouring into prod and we can see more and more consequences of this in all big corps's products - things start to break more and more exponentially faster.

The thing I keep coming back to is - does it matter? Really does it matter if a company produces something that breaks constantly or gets worse or slower.(See github) Megacorps have a wide moat and have forced out all competition or they just buy them with low interest loans. The quality of products keeps getting worse and we can do nothing but live with it. So if that's the state of the world, why wouldn't you just…

"or they just buy them with low interest loans." lmao

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

#412

Post by wholinator2 »

ebiester wrote: post #395
Galanwe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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_,…

Missing here: some organizations were rewarding high token usage as productivity without critical evaluation. People were afraid to be in the bottom because outcomes weren't being measured. It is a giant Goodhart's law lesson

What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive. I'll just set up some burn jobs to kill tokens unnecessarily and then everyone else will too and the company will go bankrupt in 10 days. It seems inconceivable for a company to set up a "who can spend the most of our money" leaderboard for any other context

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

#413

Post by wholinator2 »

jfrbfbreudh wrote: post #368
Galanwe wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 chan…

It's interesting how quick automating others out of a job turna to automating ourselves out instead

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

#414

Post by dijit »

tomjakubowski wrote: post #290
dijit wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> HN is filled with people who think engineering productivity is simple to measure. I think the prevailing (correct) consensus is that developer productivity is actually very hard to measure, and every time it is attempted the measure is immediately made a target making the whole thing pointless even if it had been a solid measurement- which it wasn't. IDK where you're getting the idea here that measuring productivit…

Is it easy to measure a factory worker's productivity? It would seem surprising and interesting if every job's productivity is hard to measure except for one particular kind.

Any job where there's a definable output can be measured. Factory workers are one type.

Others might be farmers; if they're able to yield x tonnes of valid crops out of y acres.

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

#415

Post by schainks »

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…

Try the Jira MCP server.

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

#416

Post by ebiester »

wholinator2 wrote: post #412
ebiester wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing here: some organizations were rewarding high token usage as productivity without critical evaluation. People were afraid to be in the bottom because outcomes weren't being measured. It is a giant Goodhart's law lesson

What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive. I'll just set up some burn jobs to kill tokens unnecessarily and then everyone else will too and the company will go bankrupt in 10 days. It seems inconceivable for a company to set up a "who can spend the most of our money" leaderboard for any other c…

Go look up "Tokenmaxxing."

Yes, it's as stupid as it sounds.

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

#417

Post by phainopepla2 »

i_love_retros wrote: post #159
ambicapter wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Someone at my job uses AI tools to reformat his code...

My coworker said he does that too. Also have coworkers using AI to run git commands. Nothing fancy either- just pull, push, merge etc

Do you mean they tell an LLM "push this code", or that the LLM runs the commands as part of a larger agentic workflow. The former is crazy but the latter makes sense.

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

#418

Post by bdangubic »

wholinator2 wrote: post #412
ebiester wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Missing here: some organizations were rewarding high token usage as productivity without critical evaluation. People were afraid to be in the bottom because outcomes weren't being measured. It is a giant Goodhart's law lesson

What!? Companies rewarding high token usage? That's inane, insane, and small brained. Who in their right mind equivocates spending more money to bring more productive. I'll just set up some burn jobs to kill tokens unnecessarily and then everyone else will too and the company will go bankrupt in 10 days. It seems inconceivable for a company to set up a "who can spend the most of our money" leaderboard for any other c…

there are boards… endless boards… ranking by token usage :)

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

#419

Post by mulmen »

dijit wrote: post #258
hyperpape wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do not think it is easy, like I said. I am saying other people are acting like it’s easy. See the second comment on this article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47976781 See @emp17344 responding to me.

That second comment isn't making that statement though. It's saying that: cost vs revenue is something we can see. If I buy a plow for $2,500 and it enables growth of $5000, then arguing "the plow was expensive" is a moot point. It doesn't make any argument about measured productivity, only investment vs return.

The difficulty in measuring productivity is the attribution. How do you know the new plow enabled growth?

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

#420

Post by mulmen »

4ffg wrote: post #408
emp17344 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Minor shifts in productivity are hard to measure. Major jumps in productivity would be obvious. I think it’s clear that, if AI is affecting productivity, it’s to a minor degree at best.

i think it will make things go backwards. the big leaps in productivity come from really great ideas that are formalised into concepts that then take form. this comes from being in a meditative state. not blasting output at a higher rate.

Maybe. It also lets people build things that never would have existed before. My hobby is competitive pinball. There are multiple new stat and tournament tracking apps that have been vibe coded by people who never would have written code by hand.
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