Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s not operated for profit. People can just solve (some of) their problems by talking to computers.
What are you talking about? Llm producers are not a charity.
Obviously. You didn’t read correctly. Try again.
Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
481–490 of 498 posts
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#482Relevant Pragmatic Engineer newsletter with many more cases along these lines, along with how some people are handling them: https://newsletter.pragmaticengineer.com/p/the-pulse-token-s... Tokenmaxxing seems more and more like a way to encourage experimentation and learning, and incidents like this are a part of learning. Like, today devs simply use the most expensive model by default, even to do extremely simple thi…
This is the first time I heard about estimating tokens for a task. I feel like you’re on to something. Management will pick this up, and make it part of the sprint planning. Engineers will pull out their hair wondering how you can do that. That’s like estimating how many CPU cycles a task will take. How many instructions will your laptop use while you work on something.
Yeah, and I expect estimating token budgets is going to go the same trajectory (along with the same accompanying annoyances) as estimating and tracking story points!
But done with the right mindset and proper awareness of the inherent uncertainty, you can sometimes achieve some reasonable estimates over time by starting with some T-shirt size estimates and then adapting based on actual numbers. Soon enough the team gets a sense of the nuances of the projects and its dependencies, and estimates get more accurate.
As such, the example of estimating CPU cycles for tasks is actually relevant. For instance it is a common practice in real-time embedded systems running on tiny micro-controllers. But it is also possible to get good estimates for more complex applications / OS's / architectures simply by benchmarking them over time.
The most common problem with planning and task estimation is that the corporate dynamics around it are not healthy: leadership often uses those as an SLA instead of the SWAG that they are. I worked on a team where our estimates never matched the actual time taken, partially due to rather unpredictable dependencies and high-priority tasks frequently interrupting us. But because we were clearly very high-functioning, management never held that against us. Those were some healthy corporate dynamics; not all places have that.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#483Earlier quoted context omitted.
because trend and changing fewer variables.
If you could actually prove that you wouldn’t be posting it on HN, you’d be shopping for a mega yacht.
What?
Theres hundreds of MBAs who know this and it’s used to squeeze the workforce.
Thats why its the default thinking from them, because it works sometimes.
I think you missed something.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#484Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wait, is this a joke about Lambda?
I don't think it's a joke about left-pad, but the idea that the complexity increases tremendously when you take a cloud of "small" things all communicating with each other. You've just pushed the complexity elsewhere. Claude can easily crunch the small microservice, but you're pushing the complexity to communications issues, race conditions, etc.
Oddly enough I constantly run into the same issue on monolithic codebases too.
Things could just be one file but they end up being 12. I had to look through 12 levels of indirection for a single boolean recently. Twice, on two separate projects in the same week.
At least in a single codebase, that issue is at least theoretically solvable. At least the indirection wasn't split across 12 repos!
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#485Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If you tried to use the APIs to achieve the same thing, you would be spending thousands upon thousands of dollars a month. Yeah, obviously, not sure why anyone would be using APIs at this point, seems bananas to spend more than 10 EUR per day when these "almost-endless" subscriptions exists. > My completely unfounded conjecture is that OpenAI is trying to grab developers back from Claude by burning $$$$. Unlikely,…
> miles and leagues ahead of Claude Code, pretty much from inception. Can codex run background tasks yet? CC's ability to run a process in the background and monitor its output for errors while another process access that first process, is probably what got cc so popular for web development over codex to start with.
Codex is pretty awesome rn IMO.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#486Speaking 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…
We ended up using a service like yakpdf, for HTML to PDF generation.
It handled most of the rendering issues out of the box compared to headless browser setups.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#487I 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.
Why would you do anything else? It’s still faster than me doing it as long as I’m parallelizing. I can regularly get up to 5-6 things running in parallel at the moment with no downtime. I suspect by EOY I’ll figure out how to run more
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#488I 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…
Upper management wants to say they use AI and spend is an easy indicator. That trickles down and ultimately the engineers spending a lot is seen as good. It’s just a lazy measurement, like cloud usage or number of microservices used to be.
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#489Earlier quoted context omitted.
> pasting the ticket in and letting a machine do the work for a fraction of the cost was the right choice If it were producing equivalent outcomes, sure. So far I haven't personally seeing strong evidence for that. LLMs do write code pretty competently at this point, but actually solving the correct problem, and without introducing unintended consequences, is a different matter entirely
This. LLMs are terrible at planning/architecture and maintaining clarity of vision across a project. There are lots of tools that mitigate these issues but they're going to keep coming up regardless because of the fundamental nature of LLMs. If you're not doing the design of the solutions for problems as an engineer or at least making the decisions and owning the maintenance of that architecture/design, what even is…
I’ve found LLMs very good at two things: 1. Recommending paths forward, 2. Following established architecture. Your job is to be able to treat the LLM and code as sheep
Re: Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months
#490Earlier quoted context omitted.
i assume this also includes their self driving vehicle research and trucking, not just their consumer mobile app dev
Uber cancelled their self-driving research years ago.
a quick search shows they're not developing their own AVs but they're heavily investing in them via partnerships and other experimental projects