Uber torches 2026 AI budget on Claude Code in four months

> When developer productivity tools become so valuable that engineers blow the entire budget in four months, the issue isn't the tool but that the budget was invented too early to forecast this adoption curve.

Where oh where can I find clients like these??

There are no sources or references.

Is this a submarine? https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

This continues to boggle my mind so hopefully somebody can explain how this is happening.

I’ve been using all these tools since they started popping out around 2021 personally and professionally. I probably built four or five products at this point with assistance, not to mention the thousands and thousands of back-and-forth conversations for research or search or rubber ducking or whatever.

I have never spent more than whatever the professional max plan is that is consistently $20 a month.

I asked a friend of mine who spent a couple hundred dollars in like an few hours how they did it. The answer was they basically getting these agent groups of agents stuck in a loop and they’re constantly just generating verbose bullshit that is not even interrogated and doesn’t come out with any artifact that is inspectable no matter how expert you are.

The couple of stories I have heard of these massive crazy spends are people literally just assuming these things can complete an entire human task in one shot, so they continue to hit the “spin the wheel” button until they get something closer to what they want

But I’ve yet to see that actually work

and it actually flies in the face of every instruction guide or documentation or prompt engineering process that has been described over the last almost 5 years

Uber must be the biggest tech company that got lucky with timing. They are so incredible stupid and incompetent. How on earth do you end up with that cost for AI per user.

I don’t understand. On the ChatGPT pro plan for $200/month, I am essentially running it 24/7 including nights and I can barely get it under the 40% usage mark. Why are companies not using this?

i bet someone mentioned openclaw one too many times

My company has an all you can eat policy, but I think we'd be well served by being thoughtful in optimizing usage so that we still have the overall capabilities but don't burn extra tokens by sloppy use.

AI token austerity when

Now AI slop factories make the HN front page?

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