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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

#431

Post by blks »

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…

This is essentially companies making their engineers use LLMs as much as possible, and if you don’t, you go on a pip. Many such cases.

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

#432

Post by blks »

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…

So LLMs produce PR for you, and you quickly merge them? Does anyone besides you having even a little look at them?

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

#433

Post by rented_mule »

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…

I have friends at two different companies that are taking a stick, rather than carrot, approach to this. They've set monthly minimums for token usage. Anything less than that gets you dinged in your next performance review. Imagine hiring a carpenter and writing a bad online review for them because they didn't use their hammer enough, even though the end product was on time, on budget, and worked well.

I was at a company 20 years ago that took this approach to automated tests. Everyone must write 2 a day, even if that's the only code they write that day. Once it was clear that this was being checked with automation, scripts were going around to generate and commit tests that 1 + 2 == 3 (replace with random numbers). Of course tokens are being burned this way at companies like this.

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

#434

Post by reissbaker »

kurige wrote: post #204
BeetleB wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First: There's the obvious "If the company is letting me do it, I'll be wasteful." This includes not clearing/compacting the context often. Opus now has a 1M context window, and quality is good to at least 200K. So each query is burning a lot of tokens until you clear/compact. People have already mentioned the size/complexity of the codebase. I'm new to my team and the codebase isn't huge, but it's large enough that…

> This includes not clearing/compacting the context often. Opus now has a 1M context window, and quality is good to at least 200K. So each query is burning a lot of tokens until you clear/compact. I see this repeated by others, including coworkers. It completely ignores caching. Caching itself is complicated, but the "longer context window = more expensive" is not 100% true and you are hampering yourself if you're no…

Caching is pretty simple. If it's a prefix match, it's cacheable. Very long context windows will be much more expensive than shorter ones, even with caching, assuming you're using Claude Code or some similar harness for both. You'll get caching in both, but you'll pay more for the longer context. The cost of occasional compaction is more or less negligible compared to the massive cost of the input tokens that are getting charged repeatedly for every single request.

If you have 500k context, three turns will burn ~1.5MM tokens. If you have 250k context, three turns will burn ~750k tokens. If you have 125k context, three turns will burn ~375k tokens. Claude can at most generate 32k output tokens per turn in Claude Code (and it rarely does so), so despite the higher price of output tokens, almost all costs are dominated by input token costs. Even at cached input prices, cost scales near-linearly with context length: if you 2x your context length, you'll roughly ~2x your cost.

Now, it might be the case that longer context windows allow Claude to complete the task better — although I'd be surprised if there were many tasks requiring >200k tokens just to get the job done (that's nearly ten full copies of Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream"). And they're definitely convenient, in the sense that you don't need to think about context management as much and worry about a sudden, unexpected autocompact wrecking things if you aren't carefully manually compacting at logical points. But they're definitely more expensive on a near-linear basis and you're paying for that convenience.

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

hyperbovine wrote: post #310
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_,…

> Just genuinely having 10 worktrees perpetually in parallel and cycling between them in between agent responses. Again, not necessarily bad in itself, but can exponentially conse credits. I'm pretty sure that growth is linear.

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by manquer »

adeelk93 wrote: post #421
manquer wrote: post #399

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can they get 5000 people to do the same correctly on every reinstall and enforce it ?. Small individual tasks become complex at scale , and that is why these enterprise contracts sell

You can set these policies at an org level in ChatGPT business and Claude team

- Claude Team plan is limited to 150 now[1]. You can mix between Premium (equivalent of Max 5x) and standard (Pro like)

- ChatGPT business is not user count limited (AFAIK) however business plan only supports the equivalent of Plus there is no Pro equivalent.

For larger organizations it will still come down to usage billing . The ChatGPT plan is quite limiting for most users and the only option is usage/credit billing for more consumption. Claude has the more generous usage in Team but limited to 150 users.

[1] it was only 75 till late Feb.

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

#437

Post by eiee »

mulmen wrote: post #420
4ffg wrote: post #408

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So..?

If it was genuinely worth building before, you would have. Having some kind of cost involved is a force of nature that invokes one to decide whether it is worth doing it or not.

Moreover these activities only serve to enhance the wealth and interests of the few. Congrats. Don’t forget to look in the mirror.

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

#438

Post by irlib »

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…

[dead]

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

#439

Post by Esophagus4 »

joshuastuden wrote: post #362
solenoid0937 wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the lack of evidence for LLM productivity is not an indictment on LLMs… it’s an indictment on the industry still having no real way to measure developer productivity in general.

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

#440

Post by gessha »

jackdoe wrote: post #88
embedding-shape wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I just can't figure how _how_ to burn that much money a month responsibly. Same but in regards to quotas. I'm on the 200 EUR ChatGPT plan, so presumable have the highest quota, using the "most expensive" models, on highest reasoning, in fast-mode (1.5x quota usage) and after a full day of almost exclusively doing programming with agents, I still get nowhere close to hitting my quota. In fact, since I started using…

I am running a bunch of autoresearch loops that optimize various compilers and its pretty easy to burn through as much money as you want if you have a measurable goal and good tests.

> if you have a measurable goal and good tests.

you can burn through the money even easier if you don’t have them

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