Uber Announces Winner Of ‘Most Tokens Burned’ Competition

SAN FRANCISCO—Uber leadership gathered Monday to honor the engineering team that, over a triumphant four-month sprint, generated the most AI-written code with no identifiable business value.

The winning squad helped the ridesharing giant exhaust its entire 2026 coding budget by April, a milestone executives described as both a record and a complete mystery.

“We hit 70% AI-generated commits and adoption north of 90%,” said one engineer, refreshing a dashboard showing his personal token bill of $1,900 a month. “I don’t know what any of it does, but I’m in second place.”

Sources confirmed the contest produced fierce competition, with one internal demo alone burning $1,200 in tokens over two hours. The CTO, who disclosed the budget had been incinerated before summer, was reportedly thrilled by the numbers right up until someone asked what they were for.

Pressed on whether the spending translated into anything customers noticed, COO Andrew Macdonald conceded the data was thin. “That link is not there yet,” he admitted, adding it was “very hard to draw a line” between the metrics and “producing like 25% more useful consumer features.”

At press time, leadership had announced plans to tie next year’s bonuses directly to the metric.