Uber's CTO Reveals AI Coding Tools Exceeded Annual Budget; 11% of Backend Code Now AI-Generated

ME News reports that, on April 17 (UTC+8), according to monitoring by Beating, Uber’s Chief Technology Officer, Praveen Neppalli Naga, recently stated that due to a surge in usage of Anthropic’s coding tool Claude Code, Uber’s entire 2026 AI budget was exhausted within the first few months of the year. He admitted he is starting over, as the originally planned budget scale has been completely upended. Uber has internally established a “leaderboard” to encourage engineers to maximize AI utilization. Currently, Uber uses both Claude Code and Cursor, but since late last year, Claude’s usage has exploded, while Cursor’s usage has plateaued. Naga revealed that approximately 11% of real-time code updates in Uber’s backend systems are now written by AI agents primarily built on Claude Code—a figure that was below 1% just three months ago. Uber’s vision is to transition from “software engineering” to “agent-based software engineering,” where AI agents independently handle the full lifecycle of coding, testing, and deployment, with plans to build “supervisory agents” to audit errors made by other agents. Although Naga stated that Uber has not yet considered slowing down software engineer hiring, the budget overrun suggests that its workforce strategy may adjust in line with the pace of technological implementation. (Source: BlockBeats)