Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. One executive racked up a $1,200 bill in a single two-hour Claude Code session. By spring, 95% of their engineers had adopted AI coding tools, with heavy users hitting $2,000 per month.
Their response? Spending caps at $1,500 per engineer.
But caps are a bandaid. The real problem is architectural.
The Tokenmaxxing Trap
CNBC coined the term "tokenmaxxing" — companies incentivizing developers to use as much AI as possible without worrying about results. Uber even had internal leaderboards ranking engineers by Claude Code usage.
