Uber Burned Through Its Entire AI Coding Budget in 4 Months. Here's What Smart Teams Do Instead.

The AI coding bill just became everyone's problem. In the last two weeks alone:

Uber blew through its entire 2026 Claude Code budget by April and capped employees at $1,500/month

Gartner reported that 23% of tech leaders now spend $200-500 per developer per month on AI coding tokens alone

GitHub flipped Copilot to usage-based billing, turning a predictable $19/seat into an open-ended credit drain

Ramp's AI Index shows the top 1% of firms spending $7,500/employee/month on AI — $90K/year per head, up 14.1% in a single month