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Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

simonwillison.net

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Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#531

Post by jmalicki »

dalyons wrote: post #524
jmalicki wrote: post #520

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DORAs. Rather than being sedatives, they directly target receptors in your brain that make you think you should sleep. I think the oldest one came out in like 2011. It's kind of like neuroscientists found the trigger to tell your brain "we're going to do a clean shutdown now, trigger transition to runlevel 0". Quiviviq, Dayvigo, Belsomra. All still on-patent, so they don't have generics and are pretty expensive (like…

Genuinely thank you. I’ve had sleep issues my whole life and no one has mentioned these. Not saying I will pay that, but more info is always good.

GoodRX is always worth checking out, a ton of manufacturers will have coupons if you have insurance but they won't cover it.

Ask your doctor about them, look them up in your insurance's formulary to see what's required (e.g. if you have tried both Ambien and Trazadone and can document it), and see what they can do, before writing it off!

The expectation is Belsomra will lose its patent in 2029 and then generic makers can try to get one approved - so it's not that far off!

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#532

Post by com2kid »

OptionOfT wrote: post #206
tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people. Right now the AI LLM PRs we're seeing are just introducing more work for other people, while these so-called builders are looking good with their new dashboards and functionality they're demoing. But you can't talk to them about the flow of the code. You can't ask them for their thinking as to why certain things are. It'…

> Because companies are betting that this spending will allow them to reduce cost by firing people.

I've never worked at a company that didn't have a technical backlog measured in years.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#533

Post by tikhonj »

tuesdaynight wrote: post #138

Why there are so many people that still believe that AI coding is a fad? It's something that started less than two years ago and companies are already paying thousands per seat. I know one that gives you 5k per month. Which other tool went from nothing to this level of acceptance so quickly?

I still believe Scrum is a fad and yet companies have been spending obscene amounts on to push it down developers' throats for decades now.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#534

Post by iammrpayments »

tmp10423288442 wrote: post #260
lbrito wrote: post #237

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's just a non sequitur. "companies are already paying thousands per seat" has zero correlation with something being a fad or not. There are much more reasonable rationales explaining why companies are acting the way they are than "because AI coding is not a fad"

Can you name a service that charged companies thousands/seat/month that turned out to be almost or completely useless? There's lots of random services sold to corporates that are not very useful (all the random benefits besides health care, life insurance, and other big-ticket items), but the per-seat charge of those is much smaller.

Companies love to waste money on that kind of service, before this website became everything about AI, every week someone would post how they saved a gazillion dollars by leaving vercel or AWS to self hosting as an example.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#535

Post by random__duck »

ransom1538 wrote: post #459
thundergolfer wrote: post #373

> That means each employee's AI spending cap is ~11% of that median compensation package. Probably better to use the fully-loaded cost of the engineer, which is much higher than their compensation package. The fully-loaded cost is the total cost paid for the labor power of the engineer, and it includes big ticket items such as office space, food, equipment, insurance, payroll tax, fringe benefits, recruiting costs. I…

"$330k/year" Lol. I thought I clicked on hacker news 2022.

Quoting the article : > Levels.fyi lists the median yearly compensation package for Uber software engineers in the USA at $330,000.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#536

Post by bunderbunder »

ashdksnndck wrote: post #512
timacles wrote: post #502

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised people think LLMs, a thing which mainly excels at advertising, spam and writing code is going to generate that much economic activity.

Companies whose main core competency is writing code were already making up a big chunk of the economy before AI. Also, less wealthy companies were constrained in their use of software by the inability to afford the salaries of talented programmers (and ripoff practices from software consulting companies who in theory could help). Lowering the cost of building software systems ought to unblock a good amount of econom…

Those companies are certainly writing more code. But It isn’t clear that they are increasing their economic productivity. It could even conceivably have the opposite effect by fueling a race to the bottom.

e.g. an interesting possible canary in this coal mine is that there’s been a 200% increase in the rate of new apps appearing on Apple’s App Store, but it has not been accompanied by a 200% increase in the rate at which people are buying apps.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#537

Post by sevenzero »

adithyassekhar wrote: post #503
sfn42 wrote: post #472

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you tried adding this information to claude.md so it knows? I also think your excuse is bad. "The code is legacy fucked so I'll just legacy fuck it some more because I can't be bothered to make an effort"

This is a spicy take, unless the business is willing to face some down time, and I am hired to do exactly what you said, I’d never touch any line of code unless I absolutely have to. Different environments don’t help as much. We tend to obsess over software quality when it’s the least important thing for a business. It’s just a means to an end.

This is what its about, we have multiple ecom shops running 24/7 and cant simply afford downtime or a change of business flow that maybe doesnt affect shop A and B but definitely affects shop C and D...

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#538

Post by strange_quark »

Marsymars wrote: post #289
analognoise wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself. It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t t…

> The point of a refactor is for you to think deeply about the code you are responsibility for, so you can make it better (faster, easier to work on, more tests, whatever). I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of in…

Sure they’re fine at that sort of rote find/replace job as long as it’s relatively straightforward. But it only really works if you do the hard parts yourself then tell the agent to go and do the rote part. Even then I’ve had it turn to slop more often than not as the agent has to start contorting the code into weird shapes to try and finish the job. It’ll never stop and be like “hey maybe this was a bad idea, let’s try something else”. And by the time you get to review it, you’ve spent 20 bucks on something that needs to be thrown away.

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#539

Post by sevenzero »

sfn42 wrote: post #472
sevenzero wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah the codebase is legacy fucked and I cant be bothered to try and optimize business flows without the fear of other stuff breaking. Claude 100% of the time even thinks we use laravel despite the project being some old lumen codebase, so most of laravels features are not available. It also gets the PHP version we are using wrong 100% of the time.

Have you tried adding this information to claude.md so it knows? I also think your excuse is bad. "The code is legacy fucked so I'll just legacy fuck it some more because I can't be bothered to make an effort"

Are you some kind of entitled corporate dev that barely has any influence on the codebase? If I fuck up a whole business goes down as I am the only dev there currently. We cant afford that happening. Also why would I mess with anything claude.md related? I just use the CLI tool. LLM enthusiasts always claim how smart these things are so they should figure it out on their own, you know?

Re: Uber's $1,500/month AI limit is a useful signal for AI tool pricing

#540

Post by daemin »

eikenberry wrote: post #199
freediddy wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most sane US companies will disallow use of cloud-based Chinese AI providers, because everything including code, data, PII, etc is being sent to them.

Then don't use the cloud-based Chinese providers, use cloud-base US/EU providers using Chinese models. The interesting Chinese models are all open making this issue mostly moot.

A key point here is open in terms of being able to download and use it, not open as knowing what data and instructions were fed into it when training.

A paranoid part of me thinks that these models are all inherently biased and instructed to be pro CCP, with specific gaps in their training data related to undesirable historic events and political ideas.

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