2026 New Year budget exhausted, CTO's blood pressure skyrocketing

Uber's Chief Technology Officer stated that the surge in Claude Code usage led to the 2026 budget being exhausted early in the year, prompting the team to start over and establish an internal "leaderboard" to incentivize more effective use of artificial intelligence. Currently, they are using both Claude Code and Cursor simultaneously, and three months ago, less than 1% of Claude usage has now enabled approximately 11% of real-time backend code updates to be completed by AI agents centered around Claude Code. The vision is to shift from software engineering to intelligent agent software engineering, with AI agents handling coding, testing, and deployment, and plans to establish oversight and audit mechanisms for AI errors. Although layoffs are not planned at this time, budget pressures may impact staffing strategies.