Uber used software to change how people catch a ride. Now it’s using AI to change how it creates software.
Praveen Neppalli Naga, the CTO of Uber, said in a LinkedIn post this week that 95% of its engineers now use AI every month, describing it as a “real reset moment for engineering.”
He said that over the last few months the company has “leaned in hard” to AI coding, and that the “results have been phenomenal.”
The biggest shift, Naga said, comes from agentic AI, which is when software completes tasks autonomously with little or no supervision.
At Uber, that means engineers are increasingly delegating tasks to AI rather than just accepting its suggestions, he said. That has led to 1,800 code changes a week being written “entirely” by Uber’s internal coding agent. He added that this coding agent has gone from making less than 1% of all coding changes to 8%.
“There is zero human authoring. Engineers review and approve, but the code is written entirely by AI agents,” Naga said.
Uber is not alone. A recent study of 700 companies from engineering intelligence platform Jellyfish found that 63% of surveyed firms now use AI tools for most coding.
Some companies are pushing employees to use AI tools, including integrating them into performance reviews. However, Naga said that at Uber, the “strongest adoption” is coming from engineers who are “quietly experimenting,” rather than it being “pushed top down from leadership.”
AI coding hasn’t always gone smoothly for companies. Amazon set up new guardrails following a series of outages, including one primarily driven by its AI coding tool that led to nearly 120,000 lost orders, Business Insider reported earlier this month.
The rapid advances in AI coding have created massive disruption for software engineering, a role once seen as a safe, well-paying career option. Some software engineers have said that AI tools mean they are actually working harder, leading to burnout.
“The role of the engineer is shifting – from writing every line to architecting systems and reviewing AI-generated code,” Naga added.
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