Uber engineers do not define their revenue stream; the product leadership team does.
$1500/mo of AI spend by engineers does not equate to revenue. They need to figure out revenue first before zeroing in on AI spend.
Claude has allowed me to do refactors that would have taken weeks to instead take a couple of days. It has, objectively, increased the velocity of the engineering component of greenfield features by 40% in my org. You can put a number value on that and decide if it gives you favorable ROI.
Software engineers like to talk as if business and finance are as easy as pushing code out and refactoring. It's not and never has been.
You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.
It’s a lose/lose situation for…I would say anyone employed as an engineer or programmer. I’m not taking responsible for AI output, the same way I won’t try to fix auto-generated code: because you just regenerate it.
The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.
I'm pretty pessimistic on AI and don't have access to good agentic workflows, but refactors are exactly the thing where it seems to me like agents could be really strong - once I've refactored something architecturally, I might have hundreds of instances of a thing that needs to be updated in a predictable way, but is complicated enough that it's going to be faster for me to manually update hundreds of instances rather than writing a generalizable find/replace tool.
Absolutely false. Refactors (in my case) can be as simple as dropping old packages for newer packages with slightly different semantics. It can be moving legacy pages from jQuery to Vue.
> You’ve gotten a result, but without the work that made you valuable, while deskilling yourself.
I've 25 years coding, trust me, I don't lose anything by not finding out on my own that the semantics of a jQuery promise changed between major versions.
> The only person that wins here is the person who can pay you less because they don’t need you, they just need another “types computer guy”.
You have no idea of what you're talking about. There are entire classes of K8s networking issues that would have taken me a day to debug which Claude solved in minutes just because it can run 20 diagnostics commands in two minutes and deal with technical minutae that is time-consuming but ultimately irrelevant to my business goals.
I effectively get to operate at the rate of a small team of engineers - I know that because I've managed small teams of engineers in the past.
I think this is the part I struggle with. The code I write makes me money or is a way of teaching me something, both of which are reasons that I would write the code regardless.
I don’t think I have any projects in mind that I’d be willing to spend half of a car on that I also wouldn’t have written myself.
Obviously just a personal take though. I’m glad you get the usage you want out of it.
I use Gemini/ChatGPT/Claude to do that work and it unblocked the enjoyable parts of the project while taking care of the tedium.
I also find LLMs help me learn faster because they can often take a paper and turn it into working code, which I find to be a very slow process.