Uber burned through its entire 2026 AI coding budget in four months. Engineers ran the tab up on Cursor and the rest until the CTO admitted he was back to the drawing board, because the money he thought would last a year was already gone by April. So the company capped each engineer at $1,500 a month for robot coders — and then, days later, cut 23% of its HR department. Recruiters, facilities, the people who answer your benefits questions when something goes wrong.
A spokesperson swears the layoffs had nothing to do with AI. Of course they don’t. Burn the budget on machines that already write seventy percent of your code, run dry before spring, and the very next week the humans get walked out — total coincidence, no notes. When the bill finally came due, it wasn’t the expensive new habit that got cut. It was the people who clean up after it.
This is the trade every executive is making while swearing they aren’t. The money for tools that replace work is untouchable. The money for the workers is the first thing they raid. They’ll call it efficiency, they’ll call it a hard decision, and neither was honest — it cost them nothing and it cost a few hundred people their jobs. They spent the rent on a toy and evicted the tenants. It wasn’t a hard decision. It just wasn’t hard for them.