Uber burned its 2026 AI coding budget by April and can't link it to better products

Uber handed engineers Claude Code with token leaderboards in December 2025, torched its full-year 2026 budget by April, and now caps spend at $1,500 per employee per month — with COO Andrew Macdonald saying no link is visible between that usage and better products. Everlaw is the rare counterexample with hard numbers: $3,500 in tokens cut a Java infrastructure project from 9.5 to 2.5 engineer-months. The fix engineering leaders converge on is routing at the infrastructure layer, not rationing at the prompt — cheap models as the default, escalation to frontier models only when a task needs it, via a company-wide gateway.

Source: venturebeat.com ↗